‘The Phantom Child had seemed to put forth all its force’: The Potential of Spectral Friendship in Elizabeth Gaskell's ‘The Old Nurse's Story’ (1852) and Neil Gaiman's <i>Coraline</i> (2002)

This article explores the gothic trope of inherited family sins through the lens of childhood studies. I will examine the potential that children hold within gothic texts as a counterforce to continuing generational legacies of violence. My investigation will focus on Elizabeth Gaskell's ‘The Old Nurse's Story’ (1852) and Neil Gaiman's Coraline (2002), which both represent the potential of children to bear witness to and thwart traumatic inheritances. In my examination of narratives that feature both the living children who are recipients of these traumas, as well as ghostly children manifested through traumatic memory, childhood friendship emerges as the crucial act of interruption to further harm. Drawing on theories of childhood agency and memory I argue that the friendships between living and spectral children and acts of visual witnessing represent a disruption of inherited violence.