#(please ignore the fact I drew too many strings on the pear drum it should only have 3)

[princess-ibri]

So @rainyearthquakestudent asked if I had any ideas for a backstory for The Other Mother from Coraline for the spooky season...

I don't have a whole story, sorry, but I have had one little thought floating around my head for a while, and figured it would work to share it now.

So longtime fans of Coraline will likely know that a big inspiration for the book was a short story published in 1882 by Lucy Clifford called "The New Mother"

(Also retold in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series as "The Drum")

In the tale of two sisters who meet a strange young girl who plays an instrument called a pear drum, that creates wonderful and strange music. The girl says she will give the pear drum to the sisters--but only if they are very very naughty.

The mother of the sisters warns them that if they continue to misbehave she will have to leave, and a New Mother will come and live in the house, one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

The sisters visit the pear drum girl three times, and each time tells them they haven't been naughty enough. At last they push too far and their mother leaves. The strange girl laughs at them, says they'll never earn the drum and that their New Mother is waiting for them.

The sisters return home to find that the New Mother with her glass eyes and wooden tail is indeed there, and though they try to keep her out she manages to push in. The girls flee into the woods, forced to live on what they can scavenge, while the New Mother takes up residence in their old home...

So my thought for the backstory of the Other Mother we meet in Coraline, is that she is the strange girl with the pear drum in the story--and daughter of the New Mother.

We know from the Coraline book that the Beldam canonically once had a mother:

"How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline. "I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave." "Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline. "Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back."

I wouldn't want to explain everything, I think that the mysteries of Coraline are part of the fun, but my thought is that these Beldams are a type of malignant fairy type being. They prey on children, getting them to make deals with them in order to draw them into their web and eat up their lives, using various modus operandi. But they always have something about the eyes that give them away, and they're always looking to replace someone in the human world.

The house that the New Mother gained from the two sisters is the house that Coraline would eventually move into. By then of course the Other Mother has usurped her own mother, and been somehow locked away into that pocket dimension attached to the house, so she can't move in the human world as she once did, having to rely on her rat spies. (Possibly, her imprisonment is due to her having eaten a fairy child in the book, I could see magical repercussions coming down for that). But she's still doing her best to push on with the Beldam life cycle.