Gothic Feedback and the Dark Side of Human Nature in the Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: A Freudian Psychoanalytic"

Abstract

In Little Strangers, Waters blends gothic fiction and freud psychoanalysis to critique the decays and struggles of the British aristocratic society. With the gothic and evocative backdrop of Hundreds Hall, fabled to be one of the most exquisite manors, the house comes alive in the tale's backbone, reverberating its stark remnants with the dormant terrors and hopes of the characters. The prose of the Little Stranger comes alive with the interviews and volatile feelings and the architecture of the house, as one as its decaying spires and cob vexed with the dissertated antagonistic feelings, concealed hallucinations and conquering dominion of the stifling ancestry of the house Fraythe narrates his own picture of post imperial repression of England blending the ralted order of rationality with an unconscious island surging with repressed desires, of which his infatuation with Caroline Ayres epitomizes Freudian notions of repression and return of the repressed. The mysterious happenings within the hall are psychological as well as supernatural; they are the psychological manifestations of a person’s unresolved psychological conflicts. This inquiry, considers Freudian notions of the uncanny, repression and the double to argue that the true horror in the story stems from the psychological constructions of reality which result due to the weakening of the mind. Through Waters's narrative, The Little Stranger lays forth ideas of the blurring of the conscious and subconscious paving way to the harrowing impact occur when restrained liberated emotions emerge.