The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
(Hardcover: Riverhead, April 2009; Paperback: Riverhead Trade, May 2010)
Kathleen Davies
It is 1947, and the English countryside is still reeling from WWII. Doctor Faraday has been summoned to Hundreds Hall, the home of the Ayres family, to look in on a servant girl who claims that she is too ill to work. Faraday determines that the girl is merely homesick but, before he leaves, she confides that she keeps hearing strange noises. She believes that the house is haunted.
We are in familiar territory from the moment we enter Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: there is a rational man of science, a repressed and restless heroine, her scarred and reclusive brother, her alluring mother, even a long-dead child who may be the “little stranger” of the title. There are also mysterious fires, madness, and things that go bump in the night. And of course, there is a house. Still grand despite patches of dry rot and peeling wallpaper, still impressive despite the encroachments of Council estates and nouveau riche neighbors, Hundreds Hall may be the central character in Waters’ novel (as in any good haunted house story). However, it is the unfamiliar spin that Waters puts on these familiar material that elevates her tale above a good rainy day read.
Best-known for bringing queer sensibility to Victorian generic conventions, Waters here turns a critical eye on the type of sedate country-house ghost story embraced by Henry James and Edith Wharton. But in this case, Waters doesn’t focus on sexuality (perhaps because sexuality is so often the subtext of gothic horror; the house becomes a symbol of buried impulses). Instead, she takes a good look at the house itself as an object of desire, locating the discontents of gothic horror in socioeconomic resentment rather than psychosexual neuroses.
Waters’ (very unreliable) narrator, Doctor Faraday, is keenly aware of himself as an expression of class aspiration. The son of working-class parents, he frets that his position as the village doctor’s partner doesn’t warrant the sacrifices his parents made for him. Faraday also worries about the effect that the introduction of the National Health Service will have on his income and ambitions. He is thus both flattered and relieved when the Ayres family begins to depend on him – first for medical advice, later to provide a rational explanation for a spate of bizarre sights and sounds. The characters’ relationship to the house and its haunting are informed by class. Both Caroline Ayres and her brother Roderick fear that they have given up productive lives in the larger world in exchange for preserving the family estate. Unsurprisingly, they are readier than Faraday to accept the possibility that the house has taken on a malevolent life of its own. (In one memorable scene, household objects seems to attack the family in a ghoulish parody of commodity fetishism.) But Faraday also may be haunted by the house. As a child, he was so taken with the place on his sole visit that he chipped off a piece of ornamental border as a souvenir. And, in that single neat image, Waters blurs the line between acquisition and destruction, forcing us to wonder if Faraday’s concern with the Ayres family is entirely benevolent.
Waters’ adherence to gothic narrative conventions and style has its drawbacks. Her style here is leisurely and circumspect (which may come as a surprise to readers who know her playful and robust prose from her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet) and a good hundred pages pass before the muted shocks of footsteps in empty corridors give way to something more visceral. Further, Faraday can be a frustrating presence – at one crucial moment, he literally can’t see what’s right in front of him, and the disconnect between his actions and his intentions becomes increasingly painful. Still, if you’re interested in seeing how old houses can be inhabited by new spirits, The Little Stranger offers a lingering chill sharpened by social critique.
Kathleen Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.