Haunting across the Class Divide: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and The Little Stranger

Abstract

Haunting in literary fiction is often interpreted psychologically as a sign of suppressed psychic content or as nostalgia or mourning for the loss. Yet, it may also be used allegorically as a manifestation of hidden social conflicts, and hence mark a political agenda of thus constructed works. In the novels by Sarah Waters spectres, poltergeists and haunting appear not as a sign of or a contact with an outer reality; to the contrary, they may be seen as perfectly human—though eccentric—expressions of class and economic inferiority. In Affinity spectres and spiritual séances are presented as a means of earning money by lower classes and the latter’s cunning use of the upper classes’ credulity. In The Little Stranger the poltergeist may be interpreted as an accumulated anger and desire of the servants long ignored by the masters of the emblematic country house. In both, haunting and ghosts manifest vengeance of the underprivileged taken on the socially superior. The essay shows how fictional haunting and spectrality, far from marking a supernatural reality or introducing extrasensory concepts, may function as an allegorical method to discuss political and social problems such as class inequality or social justice.