The Subconscious Tyrant: Power to Kill in The Little Stranger

Although The Little Stranger explores the effects of both World Wars on the British class system, it does so through a myopic focus on the Ayres family. Mrs. Ayres acknowledges her conscious shutting out of the outside world, saying that she has “stopped listening to the news; it’s too alarming” (Waters 22). Other than occasional, vague references to changes in the national health care system, the text remains focused on the Ayres’s small circle of family and friends.   

       Taking this scope into consideration, it seems that applying Achille Mbembe’s  “necropolitics,” the idea that political sovereignty comes from the power to dictate which human bodies die, to Waters’s novel is impossible. The essence of Mbembe’s argument – which hinges on the contemporary creation of “death-worlds” and war machines by those in power – ill fits with the domestic drama of The Little Stranger. However, at its most abstracted level, Mbembe’s claim that power comes from those with control over death can certainly find purchase in the novel.

       Faraday does a poor job of disguising his desire for power over Hundreds Hall. “It’s heartbreaking,” he tells a fellow doctor, “to see it all so changed. I don’t know if Roderick knows what he’s doing. It doesn’t much look like it” (33). He slowly inveigles his way into daily life at the house and grows closer to the family, especially Caroline. He uses that proximity to exert influence on the family’s choices, such as institutionalizing Roderick later in the novel, and eventually becomes engaged to Caroline, allowing him a legitimated way into power over the Hall. Although he never actually uses his profession as a doctor for evil purposes, the novel acknowledges the potential for that power. Caroline Ayres jokes about having to kill Faraday after letting slip a family secret, but then admits how difficult it would be, “since [he] must know all the tricks [himself]” (43).

However, it is not these social maneuverings that allow Faraday his ultimate control over the Hall, but supernatural ones. The novel suggests that the hauntings experienced by the Ayreses arise from Faraday’s subconscious; he is no more aware of their provenance than they, but the ghost constantly acts out the doctor’s desires. The psychological effects of the hauntings drive Mrs. Ayres to commit suicide – she hangs herself in her room – and lead Caroline into a fatal accident – she falls down the stairs. Caroline has just broken off her engagement to Faraday, thereby denying him his future at Hundreds. The night of the accident, Faraday dreams of going to the Hall and the maid attests that Caroline ran off the landing after crying out “You!”, calling as if “she had seen someone she knew…but as though she was afraid of them. Mortal afraid” (494). Roderick, though alive, is gravely ill and in a mental institution, where he frequently attempts to commit suicide.

       The actions of the Faraday-poltergeist cause the deaths of the Ayres family members, but only indirectly. To borrow the political language of Mbembe’s article, Faraday’s takeover uses soft power rather than hard power. Unlike Mbembe’s necropolitics, which includes a vision of state-employed “terror” that is deployed to affect the greatest number of citizens at once, the terror that emerges in Waters’s novel is specifically targeted to affect this family. The haunting assumes a form to each of them that is most likely to distress them: for instance, Mrs. Ayres, who has never gotten over the death of her first child, experiences the ghost as little Susan.

The ghost never directly, physically kills them and the family never connects the ghost’s actions with Faraday. Indeed, Faraday himself never connects his latent desires with the actions of the poltergeist. What does it mean when a “tyrant” doesn’t know that he’s terrorizing his “subjects”?
(word count: 625)