What Haunts Hundreds Hall? Transgression in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

Abstract

The latest novel by Sarah Waters, published in 2009, has received critical acclaim for its realistic representation of post-war Britain, its affiliation with great gothic classics, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Fall of the House of Usher, and above all, its ambiguous ending. However, it is a bit of a ‘shorthand’ to call the novel gothic, as has been admitted by the author herself in a video interview taken by Rebecca Lovell in May 2009. Instead, Waters calls the book “a haunted house novel.” The unanswered question of the novel is, what is it that haunts Hundreds Hall? The paper makes an attempt to provide one possible answer to this question, focusing on the idea of transgression. Of course in any gothic work of fiction the occurrence of a supernatural element signals a crossing of the borderline between the possible and the impossible. A fantastic entity questions the stability of this frontier. In Waters’ novel, however, the transgression of the real signals another crossing of boundaries. The unreliable narrator of the novel is the crux of its interpretation. The enigmatic events in the house coincide with Dr Faraday’s growing attachment to the Ayreses family. He is an educated man who, on the one hand, no longer fits into the working class of his parents, but still, due to his origins, feels insecure in the upper class to which the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall belong. His constant roaming of the class boundaries is the key to the haunting mystery. The paper is going to analyse different images and symbols of transgression in the novel to show the connection between the issue of class and the gothic elements in the book and to provide a possible interpretation of its equivocal ending.