MADNESS AND THE ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES

The paper focuses upon the motive of madness, seen as a touchstone for the narrator's reliability in the novels The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. The supernatural serves as the criterion of the characters' mental instability, since the Freudian criticism has for decades presented the visions, apparitions and other supernatural phenomena as symptoms of a deeper psychological disorder. However, the recently published The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters offers the supernatural as a new strategy of reading class and inscribing class differences into the postwar Britain.