Haunting of the Cultural Past: Unreliability, Class and the Spectral in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

Författare

Charlotte Lange Møller-Larsen

Summary, in English

Sarah Waters is an acclaimed author of several bestselling and award-winning novels. The existing body of research on Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger has been valuable and mostly engages with and suggests a correlation between class and the hauntings taking place at Hundreds Hall. Some scholarly research has also explored the unreliable narration of the novel by focusing on different themes, and focusing on either unreliability based in the novel or through reader reception. However, the intersection of the unreliable narrative perspective, class and spectrality has been neglected. The aim of the paper is to investigate the unreliable narration of Faraday, who is both narrator and a participant in the story. It, furthermore, examines how the narrative perspective explores the themes of class and haunting. I have, by close reading of passages in the novel and by combining the concept of unreliable narration and Derrida’s concept of hauntology, been able to conduct a study of both the Derridean haunting of the protagonist, Faraday, and his narrative perspective. This paper argues that Faraday’s unreliable narration functions as a deliberate literary strategy that both exposes and obscures the themes of class and haunting in the novel. Furthermore, Faraday’s narrative perspective itself becomes a site of social liminality and spectral presence, embodying the tensions between class identity and the ghostly remains of a decaying social order. This study adds to an existing scholarly field that is focused on the aspects of class and haunting by further nuancing these themes through the narration of Faraday.

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