A critical review of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger: 'she is a commensurate storyteller whose...novels are akin to a gorgeous meal'

Armitt, Lucie

English

A critical review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger: ‘she is a commensurate storyteller whose...novels are akin to a gorgeous meal’

Armitt, L

University of Salford Institutional Repository

When I interviewed Sarah Waters in 2006, I reminded her of anattempt I had made on our first meeting to try and ‘claim’ her as aWelsh Writer. Though now residing in London, she was, of course,born in Pembrokeshire, and I continue to hope to see her to reflect onthat aspect of her identity in her fiction. Her response, however, wascandid: ‘I love London precisely because I have come to it from asmall town in Pembrokeshire – which was a great place to grow up in,but London seemed to me to be the place to go to perhaps slightlyre-invent yourself, or to find communities of people – in my case,gay people – that you couldn't find at home.’1 In her new novel, TheLittle Stranger, she does not return to Wales, but she does returnto the countryside, setting the novel in the rural Warwickshirevillage of Lidcote, near Leamington Spa. Waters has, of course,established herself as a writer of lesbian historical fiction and hasself-consciously situated her work within a lesbian literary tradition.In the months and weeks prior to the publication of The LittleStranger rumours circulated, allegedly prompted by Waters herself,that there were to be no lesbian characters in it and, indeed, at firstsight there are not.The Little Stranger is set just after the end of the Second WorldWar and just before the introduction of the National Health Service in1948, therefore taking up where the 1947 section of her previousnovel, The Night Watch (2006), ends. While The Night Watch situatesat its heart a community of single women, predominantly lesbian, TheLittle Stranger is told through the eyes of a first-person malenarrator, Dr Faraday, to whom the reform of the health service is amatter for concern:I had only very recently begun to make a profit.Now ... private doctoring seemed done for. On top ofthat, all my poorer patients would soon have theoption of leaving my list and attaching themselves tonew welsh review 29LUCIE ARMITT ON SARAH WATERS’S THE LITTLE STRANGERGarden Paths andBlind Spots28 new welsh reviewAn overgrown lawn ran away from the house forwhat looked like thirty or forty yards. It wasbordered by flower beds, and ended at a wrought-iron fence. But the fence gave onto a meadow, whichin turn gave onto the fields of the park; the fieldsstretched off into the distance for a good three-quarters of a mile. The Hundreds boundary wallwas just about visible at the end of them, but sincethe land beyond the wall was pasture, givingway to tilth and cornfield, the prospect ran on,uninterrupted, finishing only where its paling coloursbled away completely into the haze of the sky. (25)A tension is evident, even here, between the presence of boundarymarkers and their breach. Verbs such as ‘run away’ convey nature’sstruggle to resist the family’s elevation, an elevation that is implied tobe topographical as much as social, for in order to be able to see thisfar into the distance one must be raised above one’s surroundings.Furthermore, The Little Stranger is a novel about trespass: Faradayenters the house, in the fictive present, as the family doctor, but hewas previously here as a child of ten, on Empire Day, when the familywere giving out commemorative medals to the village children. Hismother had previously been in service to the family, a position thatenabled her to gain access to the interior of the house for them both.As the boy wanders off to explore he is taken over by a sense ofavarice: ‘I wanted to possess a piece of [the house]’ (3), an urge thatresults in him gouging from the wall a piece of a decorative plasterborder, in the shape of an acorn (one is reminded of the economicmaxim ‘from little acorns do giant oak trees grow’), which he concealsin his pocket. Though he excuses his childhood vandalism as ‘thework of a moment’ (3), the desire to possess never leaves him, adesire that finds expression, in part, in his decision to court Caroline,resulting in a rather sinister fantasy, as he lies in his ownbed, of ‘nudg[ing] open the swollen front door ... inch[ing] across thechequered marble; and then ... creeping, creeping towards her, up thestill and silent stairs’. (325) Indeed, it is at the end of this book thatwe see this desire most fully realised, as he steals into the houseunder cover of darkness – like a ghost.The opening catalyst for Faraday’s return to Hundreds is an‘illness’ faked by Betty, actually prompted by anxiety over theuncanniness of the house. This recalls Waters’s second novel, Affinity(1999), set in the Victorian period, in which the social invisibility ofthe serving classes is used as a mechanism for hoodwinking thenew welsh review 31GARDEN PATHS AND BLIND SPOTSanother man, thereby vastly reducing my income. Ihad had several bad nights over it. (36)The novel is, then, primarily about changing class structures and thegradual democratisation of Britain and, on the face of it, the lesbianis edged out as successfully as the old aristocratic family, the Ayreses,are edged out of their home, Hundreds Hall. From the family’sperspective, the gradual ‘down-sizing’ of their dominance begins priorto the narrative opening and finds most flagrant expression in the‘new build’ council houses that spring up on part of their formerestate, not to ‘give back’ to the very community that has shoredup their dominance, but through economic necessity. The family’sdemise is the book’s primary focus, a process also underway beforethe start of the novel, the father (Colonel Ayres) being dead of ananeurism, their first child, Susan, having died of diphtheria at the ageof seven and Roderick, the son and heir, having been seriouslywounded in the war in a plane crash. Worse, however, is to befall him,his mother and sister Caroline as the book progresses, eventsexplored by means of a ghost story. As Betty the maid observes,‘There’s a bad thing in this house, that’s what! There’s a bad thing,and he makes wicked things happen!’ (129)The Gothic features centrally in most of Waters’s work, oftenemployed to expose readers to the ‘underside’ of society, that ‘place’in which the illicit resides. Mansions are, of course, the centrepiece ofany Gothic novel and readers will not be disappointed with HundredsHall, with its ‘oak-panelled walls’ and ‘lattice-work ceiling’ (61).Hundreds is an eighteenth-century family seat which resembles, atthe start of the novel, Du Maurier’s Manderley, in their sharedpreoccupation with memories, lost grandeur and family tragedy, notto mention the fact that what defines its dereliction is as much thegarden as the house itself. Faraday tells us, ‘I remembered a longapproach to the house through neat rhododendron and laurel, but thepark was now so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fightits way down the drive...’(5)2 In this preoccupation with the garden,what is also established is the importance of land boundaries asaffirmations of social boundaries. Faraday observes that, even in thehouse’s heyday, ‘The solid brown stone boundary wall, though notespecially high, was high enough to seem forbidding’ (4) but, on thewarm summer day when he first takes tea with the family, hecontemplates the panoramic view through the French doors, downfrom the entrance to the South terrace, and what strikes him is thecontinual breaching of possible visual boundaries:30 new welsh reviewstanding, as well as facilitating his mobility ‘up-’ and ‘down-stairs’. Heshares Betty’s origins, if not her limitations, but what both alsoshare is a ‘back stairs’ initiation into Hundreds as children.Though fourteen, what is repeatedly emphasised about Betty is herchildlikeness, a misnomer in The Little Stranger, in which childrenare not ‘liked’ at all.Not just a book about any kind of trespass, The Little Stranger isprimarily a book about children and trespass: hence perhapsFaraday’s greatest reservation about the new council housing: ‘theflimsy wire fences ... would do nothing to keep the children of thetwenty-four families out of the park ...’ (248) Despite this, by far themost intrusive of child trespassers belong to the upper classes:Gillian Baker-Hyde (and who can overlook the Gothic implications ofthe word ‘Hyde’?) and Susan, the dead daughter, whom Mrs Ayreslongs to haunt the house. The Baker-Hydes are the rival nouveauriche family, recent incomers residing at Standish, the ‘neighbouring’Elizabethan manor. Though disliking what they represent, theAyreses decide to throw a welcoming party, as if to prove tothemselves they still can. Gillian is ‘eight or nine’ (86) and her arrivalstartles everybody, being utterly unforeseen. The child is, undeniably,brattish: boasting that her parents ‘regularly allowed her to drinkbrandy after her supper, and [she] had once smoked half a cigarette’,the other guests turn to Dr Faraday to prompt his disapprovalwhich, when forthcoming, is quickly augmented by Caroline’s:‘It’s bad enough the little wretches getting their hands on all theoranges ...’ (92)As the narrative develops, it turns into a conventional ghost story,though one complicated by Faraday’s insistence that all ‘happenings’are symptoms of mental instability. Faraday’s namesake MichaelFaraday, of course, discovered electromagnetic induction which, likethe occult, is an invisible power source with its own mysterious abilityto invigorate the lifeless. In The Little Stranger, Dr Faraday alsoworks with electromagnetic fields, undertaking research into the useof ‘induction coils’ to treat muscle injuries (48), a treatment he useson Roderick with some success, until Roderick’s own ‘brush’ with thesupernatural renders him a lost cause. Electricity connects scienceand the supernatural in the text, beginning with the telephone, whichstarts to ring of its own accord, then the internal system of bells andspeaking tubes that connect up various parts of the house, which alsotake on animation. In a book in which servants, children and trespass(actual or perceived) coincide one cannot overlook the relevance ofFaraday’s mother. A nursery maid at Hundreds before marriage toFaraday’s father, though dead before the novel opens, Faraday hadnew welsh review 33GARDEN PATHS AND BLIND SPOTSreader. As such we are, on this occasion, primed for signs of trickery:after all, the social similarities between the two texts are clear. Affinityis another novel in which a bereaved upper-class family is recoveringfrom the death of the father and, in that text, the central protagonist,Margaret Dawes, is betrayed by her maid, Ruth Vigers, into partingwith her identity and inheritance in order to enable Ruth to elope witha female prisoner called Selina, with whom Margaret falls in loveand is helping to escape. Thus are we left questioning our class ‘blindspots’. Like The Little Stranger, Affinity employs the supernatural (inthat case clairvoyancy) to suggest messages can be communicateddespite physical barriers to that communication and that objects canlikewise be transported. Waters discredits the allure of the occultin Affinity, revealing it as a veneer for deception, under the cloak ofwhich her characters seize a licence to roam unchecked, as surely astheir servitude impedes their social advancement. Nevertheless, inThe Little Stranger, no sooner do ghosts begin to walk the floors thanwe quickly suspect Betty might be implicated, a suspicion not lost onthe social-climbing Dr Faraday, hence the following conversation hehas with Caroline, initiated by her:‘That ghost of Betty’s: it might have been him, thewhole time.’I said, ‘It might have been Betty herself! Have youthought of that? You’ve only had trouble, haven’t you,since she’s been in the house?’She made a gesture of impatience, dismissing theidea.‘You might as well say we’ve only had troublesince you’ve been in it!’ (365)This reprimand to Dr Faraday is also a reprimand to us: Waters, anovelist who delights in writing books requiring us to engage in theintricacies of plot, is not going to be ‘second-guessed’ by reproducingearlier tricks. Betty is, in fact, far more visible, even in her invisibilitythan Vigers was in Affinity. Our attention is drawn openly to thefact that Betty is ‘unmemorable’ (10) and that she stands ‘with hergaze lowered, just as she had been trained’ (97). If suspicions are inany way justified they should accrue around Faraday, for weare already wary – perhaps even resentful – of trusting this maleusurper, whom we did not expect to be trampling across Waters’spages. Faraday is needed, however, for what he represents. Hissocial origins, combined with his educational advantage, give addedcredence to an era in which birthright no longer secures social32 new welsh reviewtheir hands on all the oranges’ for they are, of course, the fruits ofheterosexual reproduction, whose increasing numbers push thespinster more and more to the margins.Waters is a member of that contemporary generation of writerswho are well-schooled in literary theory. An author of academicpublications before turning her hand to novel-writing, she is asaccomplished a writer for the academic ‘hungry’ to decode the gendertheory in her texts as she is for the educated reader simply lookingfor a challenging but pleasurable read. She is a commensuratestoryteller whose satisfyingly ‘chunky’ novels are akin to a gorgeousmeal, but she delights in – indeed insists on – making us think whileequally delighting in leading us up garden paths. In The LittleStranger she hides the lesbian ‘in full view’, utilising to do so themany blind spots of Dr Faraday. Simultaneously, however, shechallenges us to see the unseen: the ghost, electricity, ‘the apparitionallesbian’.3Bibliographical details of book under reviewSarah Waters, The Little Stranger (Virago, HB, £16.99, ISBN 978184408601)Notes1Lucie Armitt, ‘Interview with Sarah Waters (CWWN Conference, University ofWales, Bangor, 22nd April, 2006)’, Feminist Review, vol. 85, 2007; 117-27 (p.119)2Compare the opening description of Manderley in Daphne Du Maurier’sRebecca (1938; London: Arrow Books, 1992).‘The drive wound away in front ofme, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as Iadvanced I was aware that a change had come upon it ... Nature hadcome into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way hadencroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.’ (p.5)3 For a full discussion of this term see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian:Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1993), in which she argues that ‘When it comes to lesbians ... manypeople have trouble seeing what's in front of them.’ (p.2)Lucie Armitt is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University ofSalford, prior to which she worked at the University of Wales, Bangor for twelveyears, the final three as Head of the Department of English. She has justcompleted a book on the twentieth-century Gothic for the University of WalesPress, in which Sarah Waters’s fiction features prominently. She lives on theNorth Wales coast, in a house whose state of dilapidation (if not scale) isstarting to resemble Hundreds Hall.new welsh review 35inherited from her tales of bad treatment by a former mistress. Thus,when strange calls and whistles start emerging from the speakingtube connecting the kitchen to the nursery, even Faraday wonders if,‘in putting my ear to the cup, I would hear my mother’s voice.’ (334)If asked to select one word summarising Waters’s fictive vision, itwould be ‘queer’. It is a word in which she delights in all its senses,spanning the full semantic spectrum from ‘eerie’ to ‘gay’. What is clearis that Waters evokes the lesbian as a shadow-presence when sheemploys the term in any of its other senses and one would be temptedto argue that when she uses queer to mean lesbian it carries with itthe sense of uncanniness that lesbians have historically provokedwithin patriarchy. Despite this, in The Little Stranger it looks as if thelesbian has dissolved into a less specific sense of ‘queerness’ or, toevoke the title, ‘strangeness’. Perhaps, to put it more playfully, it isas if Waters chooses the Warwickshire setting to send the lesbian toCoventry. And yet, the word ‘queer’ populates this novel from thestart, gathering pace around the speaking tube incident. Fittingly, it isfirst voiced by Caroline, the ‘natural spinster’ (9), who countersBetty’s claim that the house ‘gives you the creeps’ by retorting,‘Hundreds is quiet, but there’s nothing queer about it.’ (15) Seeminglyvoiced as a defence, gradually we learn of Caroline’s dislike forHundreds and her desire to be free from it and its trappings. Refusingto settle for a heterosexual marriage of convenience to Faraday, by theend she has decided to leave for ‘London, at first’ (Waters’s own wordscoming back to us now), ‘But after that, perhaps America, or Canada... Don’t you see? I need to... get out. Get right away. England’s notgood any more for someone like me. It doesn’t want me.’ (448 – myitalics)There are a number of identifiable candidates for the identity ofthe Hundreds ghost, not to mention – considering the house is builtin 1733 – many more whose names could never be known. Whathaunts above and beyond any of these competing claims is the queeritself, used in this novel as a signifier for the absence of lesbianismrather than, as is more common in Waters’s writing, its presence.Considering that Waters was born in 1966, twenty years after thesetting of The Little Stranger, how much more difficult would it havebeen for a lesbian like Caroline Ayres to avoid negating her presenceas a lesbian (‘Hundreds is quiet, but there’s nothing queer about it’)in this raw, scarred, but ‘new’ post-war Britain, with its healthreforms, its family housing policies and its emphasis upon womenbeing impelled into marriage and motherhood as a means ofreplenishing the casualties of war. Perhaps here we have anexplanation of her apparent rejection of those ‘little wretches [who get]34 new welsh reviewGARDEN PATHS AND BLIND SPOTS

Garden paths and blind spots

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Garden paths and blind spots

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