She uses the strategies of the literary Gothic to critique the constraining narratives placed around three women: Caroline Ayres, daughter of Hundreds Hall, sought in marriage by the narrator, Dr Faraday, despite her reluctance her mother, Mrs Ayres, remnant of decayed gentry, seen by Faraday as hysterical and haunted by her dead daughter, Susan and Betty, their maid, also haunted, it seems, by Susan’s ghost (as is the war-damaged son, Roderick). In The Little Stranger, Waters draws on the cultural and critical insights of second-wave feminism, and the power of feminist Gothic influenced by the literary analysis of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to problematise conventional post-war roles and to ironise the paralysing narratives which entrap and destroy women. Each of these novels is a tale of women estranged, cast out, hidden, held back, or killed off because of the challenge they represented to the conventional gendered roles at the time. Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) builds on women’s ghost story precedents, including those of Susan Hill (1983), and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), which talk back to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1846), the name of which echoes that of the decayed landed gentry family in Waters’s novel, the Ayres.
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