Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger (2009) and Its Intertexts

摘要

The Little Stranger is a ghost story with a twist. This is something we have come to expect from a Sarah Waters novel, given the author's mastery of the narrative tease. The UK's leading contemporary female historical fiction writer rose to prominence with her lesbian romp Tipping the Velvet (1998) and her subsequent neo-Victorian novels Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2003). With The Night Watch (2006) Waters turned to the neo-forties, at the same time moving away from a focus on lesbian characters. The Little Stranger continues her interest in the forties, with a difference. The interpretative conceit for which her fiction is so conspicuous here does not rely on any sudden revelations arising from shifts in perspective or temporality but, rather, on the complexity of the historical framework adopted, for Waters embeds neo-Victorian Gothic within her forties context. In exploring the post-war transformation of social relations, Waters combines the twentieth-century theme of the demise of a country house and family with the Victorian trope of the Gothic mansion engulfed by the past. The project of the nostalgic/traumatic return is played out in a multifaceted mirror game with our contemporary period's rememorizations of the dual legacies of the “golden age” of the Victorians and the “broken age” of the immediate post-war period. Waters's novel plays with our recognition of the interpretative instabilities raised by her synthesis of the two genres. The ancestral home acts as both an emblem of the literature of our dual Victorian and war-torn past and a site of intertextual experimentation.