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Conclusion
Oh, The Stories I Could Tell: The Power of Storytelling

Alice, Wendy, Meg and Coraline are all storytellers. They understand that words have power, that stories can set us free. Imagine: Alice, who holds the Mock Turtle and Gryphon rapt with the tale of her adventures; Wendy, whose knowledge of Cinderella is the key to unlocking the secrets of Neverland; Meg, who fights the all-powerful IT by reciting nursery rhymes; Coraline, who arms herself to return to the other mother’s lair with a story of her father’s bravery. In each of these moments the female protagonist wields tremendous power—not of weapons or strength, but of language.

All stories are ultimately dependent on other stories. This is nowhere more apparent than in A Wrinkle in Time, whose intertextuality has already been discussed at length; Mrs. Who’s literary quotations and the children’s nursery rhymes give us prime examples of the salvific power of literature. Storytelling, however, also plays an important role in the Alice books, Peter Pan, and Coraline. Alice, bored by her sister’s dull book, falls asleep and dreams a story that encompasses an entire world. Once Alice has arrived in Wonderland, stories (in the form of poetry and nursery rhymes), however garbled by the world’s nonsensical influence, form her only link with the life she left behind; likewise, when she wakes up at the end of her “curious dream” (AW 98), her sister imagines the grown-up Alice’s chronicle of her adventures as a bridge to the next generation of children. Peter invites Wendy to Neverland because she knows “such a lot of stories” (PW 47). Wendy’s brothers, for all their prominent adventures in Neverland, are no more than afterthoughts as far as Peter is concerned. Wendy’s stories, like Alice’s, preserve the tenuous link between the protagonist’s own world and the alternate world; were it not for the grownup Wendy’s accounts of her childhood adventures, her daughter Jane would be unable to continue the cycle and accompany Peter to Neverland for her own string of spring-cleanings. When Coraline’s parents disappear into the other mother’s realm, Coraline writes a story on her father’s computer as if the words could somehow bring him back. Not only does Coraline reenter the other flat armed with a story of her father’s bravery, but the world to which she returns is steeped in the fairy tale tradition of writers such as Lucy Lane Clifford, whose Victorian fairy tale “The New Mother” Gaiman himself has claimed as an influence. It is Coraline’s gift of language that allows her to trick the other mother into opening the door between worlds so that she and the cat can return home.

For Alice and Wendy, whose authority in their alternate world is reduced to childish temper tantrums or retreat into sterile adulthood, storytelling represents a tremendous power—the power to capture their adventures in words so that their own children may experience Wonderland and Neverland for themselves. Their authority is a vicarious one; having left their worlds of eternal childhood behind, they can only look on as their children experience the wonder of flight and magic mushrooms for themselves—yet it is only through those selfsame stories that Wonderland and Neverland continue to exist at all. Meg and Coraline, however, refuse to be content with life as simple storytellers, observers of other children’s adventures. To paraphrase Kincaid, they refuse to cede the rights to themselves to mere successors (Kincaid 284). For these girls, storytelling is a tool, a weapon in the fight to save their loved ones from a force that is evil beyond reckoning. Their power comes not from telling, but from acting.

All four girls, ultimately, manifest a kind of heroism that is easily recognizable to children of both genders and all ages. Each enters a world in which the rules of her ordinary life are for a time suspended, and there is a certain power in that kind of freedom. Even Alice and Wendy, once ensconced in their worlds of cheerful chaos and whimsy, enjoy a liberty and authority that child readers cannot help but find alluring. There are lessons, too, to be learned through even such problematic vehicles as Alice and Wendy: that what we want isn’t always what we really want, for example, and that denial of adulthood and denial of childhood both amount to denial of life. Meg and Coraline, charged with a responsibility far beyond their years, show us that the oddball, the one with the bushy hair or the weird name, is sometimes the only one who can save the day. What these books teach us, finally, is that words and stories matter, and that heroism can come from the most unexpected sources.