When is the past never past?

In “Failing to Make the Past Present,” Stephen Best questions the supposedly “unassailable truth” of racism’s effects on current African American culture. To illustrate this “truth,” Best quotes a line from Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (462). In other words, the past is not only close and very readable to us in the present, but “the past simply is our present” and we are thus doomed to repeat it (463). For Best and his argument about African American literature, he is able to use two works by Toni Morrison to show how the past of slavery could be resolved; he argues for a reading and a reality in which slavery is a healed wound and therefore not a constant rallying force - in which slavery is truly past. 

           In many ways, Best’s affirmation of the past as past is useful for thinking about The Little Stranger. Set in 1940s England, the narrator, Dr. Faraday, is called to Hundreds Hall, the ancestral home of the Ayres family. The first chapter devotes ample time to demonstrating how Hundreds Hall’s past is over and done. Faraday, who first visited the estate when he was ten, returns thirty years later to find its beauty and family diminished. He notes, “The house was smaller than in memory, of course – not quite the mansion I’d been recalling – but I’d been expecting that. What horrified me were the signs of decay” (Waters 5). Faraday finds the Ayreses equally disappointing: only the mother, her two grown children, and one maidservant remain. Faraday’s childhood memories of the town-wide festival held at the Hall emphasize just how far the family and their home have come in the glory days of the post-World War I past.

       The novel formally manifests this interest in the past through the tropes of the ghost story. Ann Heilmann, author of one of the few critical articles on The Little Stranger, reminds us that Waters draws on a long tradition of the ghost as symbolic of the unresolved past - “the trope of the Gothic family mansion engulfed by the past and in its turn engulfing its last two generations of owners.” The potential exists, then, for a division of the novel into two: those who envision the past as past and those who constantly struggle to return to it.

       However, the novel throws the stability of these two options into question by envisioning other ways for the present and past to interact. Gyp, the Ayres family dog, comes rushing out to alert the family to Faraday’s presence. Caroline Ayres explains, “‘Little imbecile,’… tugging his ears with a look of indulgence. ‘It’s touching really. He thinks every stranger’s come to cut our throats and make off with the family silver. We haven’t the heart to tell him the silver’s all been popped’” (Waters 8). Gyp, one of the novel’s nonhuman actors, simply doesn’t see the distinction between the family’s past and its present and acts accordingly.

The ghost, another (somewhat?) nonhuman character, also problematizes the division of past and present. Throughout much of the novel, Faraday and the Ayreses believe that the ghost is the Ayres children’s younger sister, Susan, who died from diphtheria before the other two children were born. Yet the end of the novel seems to pose Faraday himself as the source of the haunting, a poltergeist. The ghost, therefore, is not the symbol of the Hall’s past, but of the family’s present. These nonhuman actors trouble a stable distinction between past and present through their distinct experiences of time.

[Heilmann, Ann. “Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and Its Intertexts.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 6.1 (2011): 38-55. Literature Online. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.]