The Little Stranger Sarah Waters

Evil

As a doctor, Faraday is a rational narrator who confronts each member of the Ayres family and the maids in turn as they divulge their suspicions that something in the house is alive. As he consults with other physicians, they are able to explain away the strange happenings easily with answers supplied by medicine and psychology. Waters does not give definitive answers about the occurrences, leaving it more a philosophical issue. Not wanting to frustrate the reader however, she admits "I tried to keep it strange, keep what was happening genuinely odd, without closing it down with a neat explanation at the end."[9] The title of the book is a reference to Faraday's continuing questions; Roderick is fearful that the house is infectious. Eventually Faraday wonders if it is "consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some 'little stranger' spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself".[5][10]

Emma Donoghue considers the deepest theme of the story to be "the unpindownability of evil", as suspicion shifts to individuals who may be self-destructing from the forces around them, possible malevolent motivations from the family or house staff, an unseen force inhabiting the house, or Faraday himself.[3] Faraday's concern for the family is often intertwined for concern for the house so that he often discourages those who are obviously troubled by staying there from leaving it. He explains away the suspicions of Mrs Ayres, who believes that Susan is in the house trying to hasten their reunion; Caroline, who believes that Roderick is so upset in the mental institution that a part of him is trying to contact the family to warn them of something; and Betty, the maid who is convinced the malevolent spirit of a former domestic resides on the second floor of the home. Faraday's rationalisations become increasingly improbable as he blames all the strangeness on fatigue, stress, even the house's plumbing.[11] Ron Charles in The Washington Post considers Faraday's deep concern for the family that is often mixed with envy to be influenced by Patricia Highsmith's psychopathic manipulator Tom Ripley.[4]

Class

Class and ambition are repeatedly referenced in the novel. Faraday's mother was at one time a nursery maid at Hundreds Hall, much like Waters' grandparents who were domestics in a country estate;[12] the reader is first given a description of its opulence when the narrator is a child and he attends a garden fête, and is so entranced with the building he plies a piece of it off and puts it in his pocket. He often revisits his memory of his first significant impression of the mansion comparing it with its current state. Soldiers were billeted in its rooms during the recent war. Two centuries of wear and weather have taken their toll, and the taxes on the British gentry are too high for the family to bear. They attempt to reconcile their family legacy with the reality of having no money to keep it up. Charlotte Heathcote in The Sunday Express and Rebecca Starford in The Australian both note that the novel is preoccupied with class.[13]

Faraday too is conflicted as he recounts how his family sacrificed everything including his mother's health and life to give him his education. He laments that he has not achieved anything with it and he visits Hundreds Hall vacillating between being flattered and feeling unworthy of knowing a family like the Ayreses. They, however, seem resolute about being unable to afford the upkeep of the house and once Roderick is gone, Caroline and Mrs Ayres are ambivalent about staying in the house. It is Faraday who is most indignant about the family being forced to sell their land and possessions. Faraday is an unreliable narrator, and reviewers noted the slight discrepancies in what he says to the family as their doctor and his devotion to the house at their expense.[3][14]

Near the end, as Faraday attempts to explain reasonably and scientifically why the family for which he has grown so fond is falling apart, he wonders what must be eating them alive; a friend blurts, "Something is....It's called a Labour government."[3][15] Barry Didock notes that Waters captures the stark mood of postwar Britain that Evelyn Waugh highlighted in Brideshead Revisited, where the social changes being wrought did not make the future seem optimistic at all.[11] The anxiety about the future is so all-consuming that Scarlett Thomas in The New York Times suggests it is the cause for speculation about each character's sanity.[14] Waters concedes that although her novels are all period pieces, they are not meant to instill an overwhelming romantic sense of nostalgia: "I'd hate to think that my writing's escapist. For me, my interest in the past is closely linked to my interest in the present, in the historical process of how things lead to others."[12]

Plot Twist

Waters' writing was well-received upon the publication of her first novel,Tipping the Velvet, a story set in Victorian London. She began writing in her early thirties while completing a dissertation in English literature about gay and lesbian fiction from the 1870s onward. Not enjoying expository writing, she attempted fiction and finding that she liked it, followed Tipping the Velvet with Affinity, another Victorian-set novel with gothic themes, and Fingersmith, also Victorian yet more of a Dickensian crime drama. All three have significant lesbian themes and characters; Waters often labels them as "Victorian lesbo romps".[12] To avoid being pigeonholed as a niche writer, however (asking "Why, oh why, did I ever allow the phrase 'lesbo Victorian romp' to cross my lips?"[5]), she followed these with The Night Watch, which also has gay and lesbian characters, but is set in the 1940s.[16]

For The Little Stranger, Waters diverted from overt lesbian themes, but incorporated other elements from previous books. A character in Affinity talks to spirits of the dead; the setting of Fingersmith is a large country estate inhabited by a small family and house staff; The Night Watch is set in post-WWII Britain with characters who are somewhat at a loss with what to do following the upheaval of war. Barry Didock in The Herald considers The Night Watch a companion piece to The Little Stranger.[11] Waters states that the change from a conservative to socialist society was her true impetus for writing The Little Stranger: "I didn't set out to write a haunted house novel. I wanted to write about what happened to class in that post-war setting. It was a time of turmoil in exciting ways. Working class people had come out of the war with higher expectations. They had voted in the Labour government. They want change.... So it was a culture in a state of change. But obviously for some people it was a change for the worse."[7] She had originally set out to rewrite a version of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, which is a courtroom thriller about a middle-class family accused of kidnapping a young girl.[17]

Waters is well known for the immense amount of research she conducts for her novels. Groundwork for The Night Watch also found its way into The Little Stranger; after this probing she concluded 1947 was "a miserable year". Much of her time preparing for this novel was spent in Warwickshire estate homes and local newspaper archives.[17] She told The Globe and Mail

I read a lot of novels from the period. And diaries were a wonderful resource. I also watched films from that period and went to museums and archives to look at ephemera from the period. I like to try to capture the idiom and slang... A writer at that time wouldn't have used profanity in a respectable novel. But if you look at diaries or letters, people were swearing all the time, in very modern-sounding ways. One of the excitements about writing about the past from the present is that you can put in a lot of the details that the mainstream novelists of the time couldn't because of the conventions of the time.[7]