The feminist gothic in the little stranger: Troubling narratives of continuity and change

Abstract

Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) builds on women’s ghost story precedents, including those of Susan Hill (1983), and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), which talk back to Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre (1846), the name of which echoes that of the decayed landed gentry family in Waters’s novel, the Ayres. Each of these novels is a tale of women estranged, cast out, hidden, held back, or killed off because of the challenge they represented to the conventional gendered roles at the time. In The Little Stranger, Waters draws on the cultural and critical insights of second-wave feminism, and the power of feminist Gothic influenced by the literary analysis of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to problematise conventional post-war roles and to ironise the paralysing narratives which entrap and destroy women. She uses the strategies of the literary Gothic to critique the constraining narratives placed around three women: Caroline Ayres, daughter of Hundreds Hall, sought in marriage by the narrator, Dr Faraday, despite her reluctance; her mother, Mrs Ayres, remnant of decayed gentry, seen by Faraday as hysterical and haunted by her dead daughter, Susan; and Betty, their maid, also haunted, it seems, by Susan’s ghost (as is the war-damaged son, Roderick). Waters captures the troublesomeness of a transitional moment in history as embodied in the haunted fabric of the house and the troubled lives of these people, each caught in a time warp (except Betty, who leaves for a job in post-war Britain). They are trapped between the damage of the past-the war, lack of funding, physical harm and the limiting stories they tell themselves, and the challenges of the present-educational equality, jobs for women, the establishment of the welfare state, council houses for all, the decay of ancestral homes and the outdatedness of specific conventional roles for women.