Class Trauma, Shame and Spectrality in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

Abstract

Sarah Waters’s fifth novel, The Little Stranger (2009), constitutes a most remarkable example of what S.T. Joshi has described as the resurgence, since the 1980s, of “the neo-Gothic” (2000, xv). This literary phenomenon runs parallel to the increasing interest of contemporary mass culture in what Slavoj Žižek considers to be its “fundamental fantasy”: “the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living” or to collect “some unpaid symbolic debt” (1999, 16). Žižek’s observation on our current fascination for ghosts brings to the fore the crucial importance we attribute to the past and, particularly, to the relation between the wellbeing of the living and our understanding and respect for the dead. Indeed, the unprecedented interest in historical memory evinced by our contemporary western world points to an ever more urgent need to create an awareness of a whole variety of neglected and/or consciously erased historical facts, ranging all the spectrum from the mass murders of civilians in armed conflicts or the attempt at exterminating racial, sexual or cultural minorities, to the contributions made by women to science or literature, for example. In Spectres of Marx and related essays, Jacques Derrida theorised this relationship of the living to the dead in Levinasian terms, establishing an ethical relationship between the subject and the spectre, understood as the radical other. Thus, Derrida’s spectres are a source of valuable knowledge which opens up unknown possibilities for the future. The spectre’s desire for dialogue with the haunted subject contrasts with the unrealiability and secrecy of Abraham and Torok’s phantom. Like the ghost of popular culture, the phantom makes it presence in the realm of the living in order to pose a threat, demand retribution for a symbolic unpaid debt and/or ensnare and mislead the haunted subjects so as to ensure that its secret is never revealed. In his analysis of The Little Stranger, Georges Letissier offers a well-argued interpretation of the haunting of Hundreds Hall along the deconstructivist line theorised by Derrida, concluding that the little stranger is a spectre evincing the effects of history on the British rural aristocracy in the aftermath of the Second World War. Although there is no denying that Waters’s reviving of the ages-long tradition of the haunted mansion allows her to draw a complex picture of the historical, political and social changes that abutted in the extinction of the landed aristocracy and the transformation of the menial into the working class, the article argues that the little stranger shares the defining traits both of the popular ghost in the tradition initiated by Horace Walpole and of Abraham and Torok’s phantom, and is haunting Hundreds Hall with the purpose of ensnaring and destroying its inhabitants so as to preserve the shameful secrets on which its very existence depends.

The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2015-65775-P). The author is also thankful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05).