Attraction vs. Repulsion: Faraday's Reaction to the House and the Ayres Sarah Moorhouse 12th Grade

Walters said of her 2009 novel The Little Stranger that it was driven by an interest in the capacity of people ‘to contain a range of emotional experience’, and this is particularly evident in her evocation of Doctor Faraday, its narrator. We see a continual conflict between his intense attraction towards Hundreds and its inhabitants and his resentment of the Ayres and the class system they represent. This manifests itself in ambiguity as to whether Faraday yearns to preserve or destroy their way of life. However, resentment and desire both fuel an obsession which suggests that Faraday’s attraction to the world of Hundreds is overpowering.

As a doctor who has needed to work hard to gain his position, Faraday represents the more upwardly mobile section of society which was emerging in the 1940s, particularly after the Second World War. He is very aware of the contrast between his own and the Ayres’s way of life, and, as the critic Simons argues, ‘the story is coloured by his resentment of the privileged leisured classes’. This resentment transpires through departures from his otherwise measured narrative tone; for example, when Caroline refers to Hundreds as ‘not such a bad old pile, I suppose’, Faraday comments ‘for once, her...