Creep. When it’s a verb it moves
slowly and often overtakes one by surprise. When it’s a noun, he -- she or it
-- gives you the willies.
The Little Stranger is a creep who/that
creeps up on the reader.
In my reading of Sarah Waters’ book, the Little Stranger is
Faraday – although for much of the read I could be convinced otherwise. I thought that perhaps
it was a figment of each character’s greatest desire. Now I know it’s both. The figments detach and take on a life of their own but,
someone, as Caroline said, is at the root of it. She suspects her brother Rod at
the time.
It's Farady.
What’s marvelous about this
revelation is that Waters keeps it from both reader and characters alike so
long, and so artfully. Faraday, himself, never seems to get it as evidenced by
the last sentence (which finally also reveals the identity of the ghost to the
reader).
But back to the beginning.
As a 10-year old Faraday is a little stranger who visits the Hundreds on Empire Day with his mother. He is so taken
with the house and takes a piece of it – a small acorn from the molding. “It
was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it—or
rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspect a more ordinary child
would not have felt, entitled me to it. It was like a man, I suppose, wanting a
lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become
enamored of.”
As a 40-year old he returns to
treat a young servant, Betty, who is faking illness because she is afraid of
the large, creaky house. At this point, I would agree with Caroline Ayers that
the house is nothing to be afraid of ---- yet.
Faraday slowly insinuates himself into the household, first
by attaching electrodes to Rod’s leg--- how creepy is that and how reminiscent of
old-fashioned doctors, who were also called leeches (as in Hawthorne’ Scarlet
Letter chapter “The Leech and His Patient”). This is the beginning of the
similarity to Chillingworth for me (with a shade of Dr. Frankenstein tossed
in).
While early Gothic novels featured perverted
priests; the modern-day equivalent is the doctor.
How nice Faraday is. How safe he seems.
How concerned he is. How understanding.
As a doctor, he’s in the position to listen to all the patient’s concerns—the
most intimate of one’s emotional, physical, spiritual and even supernatural complaints and to cater to them,
dismiss them and exploit them. He knows the weaknesses of each member of the
family.
Faraday is not so
enamored of the family as he is of the house; the house, which is as another
reader has said, is a character in the book. It’s the house Faraday wants to
possess – and so the house becomes “possessed” by him.
The explanation of how such possession
comes late in the book in two parts. First Caroline tells Faraday of two books
of her father’s she has found. Interestingly she first thought they were
“medical textbooks.” But Phantasms of the Living and The Night Side of Nature
don’t describe physical but rather supernatural disturbances. These
disturbances closely parallel what has been happening in the house. (P 372).
The books describe poltergeists.
“They are not ghosts. They are parts of a person… Unconscious parts, so strong
or so troubled they can take on a life of their own. The book says that when they’re unhappy or
troubled, or they want something badly – Sometimes they don’t even know it’s
happening. Something … breaks away from them.
… Suppose it’s Roddie…. “Well if this book is right, then someone’s at
the root of it.”
Faraday is the catalyst. He sets
off each member of the household. First, the poltergeist gets rid of the dog –
when he bites a “little stranger,” the wrong little stranger, but nevertheless
an uninvited small guest.
Rod is afraid of fire – having been
burned in the war and he is frustrated with balancing the books and running the
manor. His undoing is a response to that.
Next up Mrs. Ayres—who loved her
first child Sarah, and lost her at a young age.
The piece of her that haunts her is the child calling her to join her in
death.
Finally, the plain spinster
Caroline, who is humiliated once when the gathering at which she is presented
to a potential suitor, Mrs. Baker-Hyde’s brother, Mr. Morley, turns into
disaster. (Curiously, this nearly doesn’t happen. The delay of the Baker-Hydes’
departure only happens because Faraday asks a question.) Her desire for marriage
– and escape from The Hundreds takes up the final third of the book as Faraday
courts her. And oh what a creepy suitor he turns out to be.
When does no mean no? He repeatedly
convinces himself that Caroline’s no’s are only said because she is tired or
not in her right mind. Increasingly we see him try to change her mind and that it's the house he wants, not her.
Faraday’s colleague Seely completes
the explanation of how poltergeists work. He uses a family example: “But suppose the stress of my uncle’s injury,
combined with the bond between him and my father—suppose all of that somehow
released some sort of … psychic force. The force simple took the shape that
would best get my father’s attention.’ He goes on to apply it to the Ayerses.
“Is it so surprising with things
for that family so bleak? The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners,
after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s
call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to
develop --- to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger
grow into? A sort of shadow-self perhaps: A Caliban a Mr. Hyde. A creature
motivated by all the nasty impulses and hunger the conscious mind had hoped to
keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice and frustration…. Caroline suspects
her brother….”
Faraday considers this theory for a
bit – but looks to Caroline as the catalyst, before dismissing the irrational
with the rational explanations he so often prefers.
As it turns out the character most
full of nasty impulses like envy, malice and frustration is Faraday.
As his courtship of Caroline -- and the motivation behind it – to takeover
the Hundreds -- becomes increasingly frustrated, those impulses become clearer
to the reader, and he becomes increasingly unhinged.
When Caroline leaps –or is pushed –
from the stair landing, he is asleep in his car dreaming – and who knows where
is unconscious is – he describes an out of body dream: “And in the slumber
I seemed to leaved the car, and to press on to Hundreds; I saw myself doing it
with all the hectic, unnatural clarity with which I’d been recalling the dash
to the hospital a little while before. I saw myself cross the silvered
landscape and pass like smoke through the Hundreds gate.”(p484)
During Betty’s testimony in court, Betty
hearing Miss Caroline call out the word ‘You” “as if she had seen someone she
knew, but as if she was afraid or them and then describes seeing Miss Caroline
fall. During this testimony, Faraday grows so ashen; a colleague asks if he is
all right. Betty goes on to
describe her ghost theory saying, “The ghost hadn’t wanted her in the house,
but it hadn’t wanted her to go either. I was a spiteful ghost and and wanted
the house all for its own.”(P494-5)
Betty has described Faraday
perfectly.
And then of course there’s the book’s
final sentence. Faraday tells us if
Hundreds Hall is haunted, he doesn’t see the ghost. When he looks in the window
pane, the only face he sees is his own. He does not recognize the possibility
that he may be the poltergeist; this reader however, begs to differ with his
vision.
Final final thoughts: All I have touched on here is an answer to who
is the stranger and how the poltergeist works. I was fascinated to read in the acknowledgments
that Waters lists works of nonfiction she is indebted to and includes Phantasms
of the Living (1886) and The Night Side of London (1848), among other books
about poltergeists. I like it that these are real books.
The other aspect of this book that I admire is
the larger theme of one age overtaking another and the diminishment of grander
times, grand families, grand estates.
