Asexual Representation in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day is a 1989 Booker Prize winning novel by Nagasaki born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. In 1993 the film adaptation was released, starring Anthony Hopkins as the butler — Stevens — and Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton, the housekeeper.
The older I get, the more I appreciate this story. An appreciative audience probably needs to have experienced regret — that specific sadness that sometimes strikes when you realise every single decision you make in life cuts off other possibilities, with no going back for a re-do:
Every single moment is a moment that you’re never going to get to live again and it’s happening right now, all the time, even if you’re twenty. Never mind if you’re getting to be middle-aged like me and it’s really obvious that that’s the case.
That notion is alarming, but the fact that it’s built in for everybody and unavoidable is actually kind of liberating because then it’s like, okay, we just need to figure out some half-way decent ways to deal with that.
Note that this realization can be liberating. I want you to remember that part, because I feel — against the dominant reading — that Mr Stevens finds his own form of liberation in the end.
That’s because The Remains of the Day may also have special significance for aspec audiences—like me. I’m very interested in the character of Stevens, the butler, who I read as aroace, even though the book was written and filmed before that word and concept existed.
Beyond the book itself, I find it interesting to read what academics and other commentators have had to say about this character and his role in illuminating the story’s themes. Naturally, my aspec reading is not the dominant one.
We might also use the story of Stevens to think on the notion of a ‘life wasted’ in terms of singlehood. In this story, Stevens passes up the opportunity to settle down with a romantic partner. The dominant reading: His “failure” to grab life by the horns complements the simultaneous plot thread — Stevens has unthinkingly devoted his life to a politically naïve and dangerous man.
If you haven’t read the book or seen its film adaptation, I recommend doing either or before reading further.
In my opinion, the film is a perfectly satisfying adaptation of the book. As usual, there are minor differences in plot and character. I’ll default below to talking about the film.
IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT
Published in the 1980s, the story is set in two timelines — the 1950s, looking back to the 1920s and 30s.
The story opens in the summer of 1956, specifically. British society is in the throes of great social change.
(Mr) Stevens is an English butler. All his working life, Stevens has served in the household of Lord Darlington, now dead. The great house has just been sold to a nouveau riche young American called Farraday who has ‘purchased’ Stevens along with the house, hoping to have bought his way into a quaint but dying slice of British life. Farraday is playing the part of an old English Aristocrat, but mainly for playful “Disneyland” reasons, and prestige.
But the household is short of a housekeeper, and by now, Mr Stevens is getting on in years. So Stevens gently suggests to the new Mr Farraday that he visit a former excellent housekeeper who used to work here during the 1930s. She might be persuaded to return.
Via first person narration, the present-day story is cast as a travelogue as Stevens goes on a solitary road trip, driving Farraday’s car.
Stevens (badly) drives the luxury car which once belonged to the “great gentleman” Lord Darlington, and on his travels is thereby mistaken for a member of the upper class. This sits awkwardly with Stevens, who is used to a lifetime of self-abnegation.
On this road trip, Stevens looks back at his time in service and we learn about the time in the 1920s and 30s when the young housekeeper worked at the estate and desired a relationship with him. However, Stevens was passive in the face of her moves. Greatly upset at his rejection, Miss Kenton moved away and married another man. But now Stevens is nearing the end of his life. He is perhaps suppressing complicated thoughts about his decision to devote himself entirely to service.
He recalls the interwar period, and confronts the difficult reality that he was in service to a man whose political opinions he does not understand. It has been in Stevens’ own best interest to ‘half know things’, not only regarding himself and his own personal desires for human connection and someone to call family, but also to half know things about the bad actor he devoted his life to — Lord Darlington.
When he visits Miss Kenton — now Mrs Benn (though freshly divorced) — he is gutted to learn that there’s no way she can return to her role as housekeeper after all. Her daughter is expecting, and she must stay close to her family as grandmother.
Mr Stevens returns to Darlington Hall and helps release a pigeon, stuck inside the house, which has now been fitted out with a ping pong table. The bird flies away, juxtaposed with Stevens, who we extrapolate will remain in that house until he dies.
Some critics don’t like the ideology behind The Remains of the Day, partly because it seems a classic example of “Merchant-Ivory” fiction, glorifying the lives of an aristocratic class who became rich via exploitation. Others see this story as a subversion of “Merchant-Ivory” fiction, and that’s how I see it, too. At a global level of the story, here’s nothing glorious to see here. Only unearned power, waste and frivolity.
It is also easy to see Mr Stevens as insufficiently rounded, thereby denying the full humanity of the servant class. As the prototypical example of an early 20th century (robotic) English butler, some audiences may think he stands in for an entire class of people. In reality, the servant class were self-actualised in their own way, so some critics believe he is bad representation.
However, I push back on this view. Via an aroace reading, I am able to see full humanity in the character of Mr Stevens.
THE CHARACTERISATION OF STEVENS
Born into the servant class, Stevens seems recognisably Autistic, which — adding asexual and aromantic — is a common triad of attributes. Asexuality, though fairly rare across the broader population, more commonly occurs in Autistics. (Note: Most asexual people are not Autistic; most Autistics are not asexual.)
Actor Anthony Hopkins received a late-in-life autism diagnosis in his 70s. Not entirely by coincidence, I feel, Sir Anthony Hopkins was offered the part of Mr Stevens and played it very well. Some might argue that my reading of Mr Stevens (fictional) is influenced by Anthony Hopkins (real, diagnosed man) but in fact I already read Mr Stevens as highly relatable to myself, an Autistic viewer, before I had the faintest idea about Anthony Hopkins’ neurotype (or my own).
Below is an example of a critic who believes Mr Stevens is an unfortunate stereotype of butlers:
Ishiguro’s hero is an English butler named Stevens, a creature of native loyalty and limited intelligence who is so corrupted in mind and spirit by working for a pro-Nazi aristocrat in the thirties that he thinks his household duties more important than attending the deathbed of his own father. He meekly accepts the unjust dismissal of two housemaids who happen to be Jewish, and he ignores the love of a good woman. To be a servant is to be servile through and through, one is meant to suppose; and servility can become a habit of mind that destroys the soul.
— “The Silence of Servants” by George Watson. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 103, №3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 480–486
George Watson’s essay exemplifies the view that The Remains of the Day does a disservice (ha) to people working in service — partly because Ishiguro’s butler, Stevens, is ‘of limited intelligence’.
But there’s nothing to suggest that Stevens is of limited intelligence. Intelligence comes in many forms. For instance, there’s a huge difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Stevens does not know much about the world — no doubt about that. This is partly deliberate on his part — to educate himself on world news would not make his own life more pleasant, and would probably make it much, much worse. Nor has he had much opportunity to develop his fluid intelligence. But! Throw divergent neurotypes into the mix and you might as well throw the entire concept of ‘intelligence’ into the sea. The fact is, we are never afforded access to the innermost chamber of Stevens’ brain. Written in the first person, a limited mode of narration is inevitable. This is not the sort of man who reveals everything to all and sundry. So I’m reluctant to make any claim at all about his so-called ‘intelligence’.
This leaves plenty of room for extrapolation, and is precisely why I can speculate so confidently about the character’s neurotype and sexual orientation.
Adam O’Fallon Price described once on Twitter how writers must have a parallactic view of character when writing good fiction, seeing through:
- the eyes of character
- seeing what even their character can’t see
Moreover:
There is, or should probably be, a gap between what the protagonist or narrator knows, and what the book knows. The author manipulates the size and specific nature of this gap to produce narrative effect.
Generally speaking, this effect is one of irony.
Adam O’Fallon Price
What the ‘book’ doesn’t know: That men like Mr Stevens found their place in large households as butlers because the work suited their neurotype and sexuality.
Some ironies only exist in the mind of the audience. Others occur in the mind of the fictional character. Irony can occur on many different levels. For me, one great irony of The Remains of the Day is that Stevens managed to live a comfortable life even while dedicating the entirety of his life to a bad man, followed by a ‘try-hard’ man.
The role of a butler is the perfect fit, in many ways, for an Autistic asexual man living through the 20th century:
- A set routine;
- Access to an excellent library, and plenty of mundane tasks to allow great freedom of mind and imagination;
- Very clear rules and procedures, many of them written down;
- The social hierarchy is clear — there’s no guessing who is above who in rank. This eliminates the need for ‘hierarchical jostling’, which Autistic people are not typically interested in and also not typically good at.
- As a white man, Mr Stevens could work his way up to a position of authority among people of his own class, affording him all the masculine respect he might crave:
It is important to recognize that it is the job of [Stevens'] choosing, not one that has been forced upon him. It is tempting to write the job off as no more than servant of the wealthy, but it is actually the equivalent of presidency of a small company.
from an IMDb featured review
- Any expectation that Stevens marry/have sex with a woman is not officially expected in this environment, to the point where an Autistic asexual man may not even realise anyone expected him to have his own sex life at all.
For these reasons and more, throughout history, many Autistic working class people would have found a good vocational fit by working in service. I’m sure many asexuals found themselves happily and genuinely single in their lives behind the green doors. If they were lucky, employers treated them well.
DID STEVENS LOVE MISS KENTON?
Note that ‘aromantic’ does not mean ‘without capacity for love’.
I believe Stevens loved Miss Kenton (later Mrs Benn) very much. Sir Anthony Hopkins certainly played him that way.
And he is still in love with her decades later. Here is Mr Stevens realising that Mrs Benn won’t be returning to Darlington Hall and that he will never see her again after this evening.
Before realising:
After:
Mr Stevens is clearly wanting to say more, but stops himself with a finger across his mouth.
When they say goodbye, Stevens and Mrs Benn very briefly share an umbrella. Western audiences may not recognise the significance of a shared umbrella. In Japanese love stories, this trope is called aiaigasa (相合い傘).
As TV Tropes puts it: ‘Back in the day, it was not seen as kosher for a young woman to be seen in public with a man who was not a family member. One exception was during a rainy day when a man could offer to share his umbrella with a young maiden in the street if she hadn’t one herself.”
Mr Stevens and Mrs Benn touch each other for the final (and almost the first) time. The camera lingers for just a moment on Stevens’ hand after Mrs Benn has withdrawn hers. Mrs Benn has moved on, emotionally. Her heart is with her daughter and grandchild. But Mr Stevens has loved Miss Kenton his whole life.
The loss here is that Mr Stevens can never be afforded the luxury of platonic love in a society which prioritises romantic love above all others, in pursuit of the heteronormative ideal.
THE DOMINANT, AMATONORMATIVE RESPONSE TO THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
The following is just one comment, from Tumblr, but for allonormative audiences, I believe this comically hyperbolic rant nonetheless illuminates the common (and intended) response:
Just finished Remains of the Day for the first time and why the actual fuck am I so sad??
FUCK YOU STUPID FUCKING MR STEVENS WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST TELL HER UGHHH
I’m literally gonna fucking kill him I’m so ANGRY SHE’S CLEARLY IN LOVE WITH YOU AND YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH HER JUST KISS HER OR SOMETHING I’M BEGGING
WHEN THEIR HANDS SLIPPED APART IT WAS LIKE REVERSE CLANNIBAL AND IT RIPPED MY SOUL OUT COMPLETELY??
— raspberryfingers on Tumblr
(I believe “reverse Clannibal” refers to Silence of the Lambs fanfic, but that’s as far as I’m delving into that.)
The fact is, allo-allo (allosexual, alloromantic) viewers can feel secondary sexual frustration by watching any potential fictional romance fizzle. As an aroace, I have almost the inverse response. I feel sad for Mr Stevens that Mrs Benn (formerly Miss Kenton) cannot return to Darlington Hall, but if she were to return, I’d only accept the storyline if Mr Stevens and Mrs Benn were to resume the relationship they enjoyed before, with a deeper understanding of (non-)expectations.
Although the ranty Tumblr post above was clearly made partly in jest, I’m reminded of this:
Artists, writers, and creators of any kind do not owe their audience enjoyment. What they do is offer an experience. Whatever you do with that is up to you. If someone makes art that pisses you off, they haven’t failed at anything — they have successfully provided you the experience of being pissed off by art.
Because many allo-allo members of an audience expect sexual and romantic gratification as part of a plot, they can sometimes respond as if there has been some abomination of nature. Some people do get genuinely peeved if they don’t get what they want in this particular regard.
The knock-on effect? The world is full of a certain kind of story, and almost bereft of another kind of story, in which aroace characters find peace — and even happiness — even after rejecting the sexual and romantic offers which inevitably come our way.
Readers and viewers can see that in many ways Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton are very well suited:
- They are both very devoted to their jobs. Fusspots, with extreme attention to detail.
- They respect this trait in each other.
- They’re both very conservative, with a keen attention to rank, though at times they disagree on what maintaining rank looks like in practice.
- Miss Kenton tells Mr Stevens she looks back on her time at Darlington Hall as the happiest years of her life.
- Stevens tells Miss Kenton she is very important to ‘the house’, deflecting professionally from saying she is very important to himself.
- We see Miss Kenton try her best to get close to Mr Stevens. She offers him a number of opportunities to reveal his love for her and he refuses every one.
The happy-but-poor, idealistic young couple who throw in a career of service to go and get married serve as counterpoint to the older, more conservative Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton:
RELATABLE ASEXUAL SUBPLOT: AN OPPOSITIONAL INTERPRETATION OF REMAINS OF THE DAY
Asexual viewers will readily recognise the compulsory sexuality evinced by Miss Kenton when she teases Mr Stevens about possibly finding a young, pretty maid attractive. “Is it possible Mr Stevens fears distraction?”
As they walk from the conservatory across the gardens, she suggests that if Stevens were to find the young woman attractive, that would suggest he is human. The flip side of this is acephobic: That anyone who is not inherently interested in romance and sex is not human.
This scene is the perfect representation of microaggressions which sexual people do not perceive to be microaggressions at all.
Miss Kenton teases Stevens again when she demands to know what book he is reading. Her disappointment is palpable when she wrests the book from his hand and finds that he isn’t reading erotica after all, but “a sentimental old love story”.
Stevens as played by Anthony Hopkins is visibly uncomfortable at the physical contact. From an aroace perspective, there’s more going on here than repression of romantic love. Stevens would understand full well that he has let Miss Kenton down, and that he would always let her down. To him it is a kindness to avoid expressing his platonic love for her, for if he were to tell her he loved her, but did not want to marry or have sex with her, she would no doubt find this even harder to deal with, and accuse him of leading her on.
Even Lord Darlington has assumed that Mr. Stevens is a sexually experienced person, which speaks to a culture of compulsory sexuality.
Mr Stevens does not feel comfortable telling his employer that he is hardly in a position to explain the birds and the bees to his nephew. Instead, he tries his best, fails miserably and his character becomes an object of fun for the audience, but a very relatable character for many aspecs.
Later in Stevens’ life (though earlier in the film), Farraday will have the same fun with Stevens, assuming Stevens’ interest in Miss Kenton is romantic in nature, and that he is simply too shy and reserved to admit his feelings, which are of course assumed to be inevitable, in a culture of compulsory sexuality.
Of course, Mr Stevens does not have the language to describe his orientation, because asexuality remained a conceptual hole until the 21st century. Every asexual person had to find their own way of conceptualising their sexuality, and for Mr Stevens, he did conceptualise it, but explained away his lack of desire as a striving for ‘greatness’. This comes across as laughably pretentious, of course.
I don’t for a moment believe Kazuo Ishiguro deliberately wrote Stevens as aroace. However, I do believe he is writing a recognisable human being, and that this archetype, which existed in real life, was as frequently asexual as truly repressed. (Funny how the same repressive culture seems to repress some people yet spurs others on, don’t you think? This can only be explained by human variation.)
A reading in which Mr Stevens is asexual and aromantic makes sense. The hegemonic-dominant interpretation has it that Mr Stevens is simply repressed, as per the dictates of his profession. But this does not explain why his own father, who grew up in the same repressive system, did have sex with a woman at some point (despite not loving her — providing an interesting counterpoint as to any assumed correlation between sex and love). Mr Stevens elder was (probably) allosexual. He was a sexual man. The son is not. Yet father and son have very similar, potentially repressive backgrounds.
As a servant, Stevens’ public life of ‘celibacy’ need not be constantly explained away. Instead, the microaggressions which come his way are infrequent, as we see with Miss Kenton’s teasing. For the most part he can live his life quietly, unobtrusively and find a family, of sorts, in his fellow workmates.
The only trouble is, the workmates he grows to (privately) love do eventually move on. This would be vexing for him, and exert a much greater emotional toll than he is prepared to admit to himself. Instead he says, when interviewing Miss Kenton for the position of housekeeper, that when servants pair up, this causes problems for ‘the house’.
He really means for himself, of course. It is of very little consequence that servants move on, because servants are easily replaceable. (Service was the biggest employer of women during this era — there was no shortage of skilled women seeking work in post war England.)
Going with the Stevens-as-aroace interpretation, the great sadness of Stevens’ love life is not that he failed to propose marriage or romantic love to Miss Kenton, but that he is living in a subculture where the only path to avoiding isolation and loneliness involves building a nuclear family. We have always suffered a crisis of care. There’s never enough care to go around, and the bulk of care work falls to women. Without a woman, he has no one.
As an asexual, aromantic man whose terms of employment proved to be a rug pulled from under him, Mr Stevens is in for a big dose of loneliness in his old age. I suspect that, for Mr Stevens, loneliness is his default state, and he would fail to interpret loneliness as any such thing.
Miss Kenton is the contrast character who knows exactly when she is lonely, but because she is able to recognise the feeling, she is able to do something about it. (E.g. leave her husband and focus on her daughter’s family.)
If Stevens were a contemporary 20-year-old on Tumblr he could have said any of these things (from the Aro Culture Is archive.) Stevens’ queerplatonic relationship with Miss Kenton isn’t so clear in the film as it is in the book, but this pair spend evenings together for years. I have no doubt this suited Stevens perfectly. Of course, it never suited Miss Kenton, who is allosexual.
AND WHAT HAVE REVIEWERS AND SCHOLARS MADE OF MR STEVENS AND HIS SEXUALITY?
THAT MR STEVENS DOES NOT KNOW HIMSELF
Remains of the Day was endearing, heart breaking, subtle and just BEAUTIFUL. For such a short book, it packed a punch. The simplicity of Steven’s thoughts, the way everything unfurled in which the reader understood him more than he understood himself, that entire bit where he wanted to practice bantering, and when he tries to sideline crying on his mother’s death….is lovely and heart breaking.
Unreliable narrators: Pale View of the hills & Remains of the Day, sunsedge
MR STEVENS AND NORMATIVITY
There is increasing acknowledgement that we are all shaped by a society with strong normative expectations. In the 1980s when Ishiguro wrote this novel, everyone was still expected to be allosexual (i.e. not asexual), cisgender, romantically oriented, heterosexual. Family is still king. Even with wider acceptance of gay and lesbian partnerships, the idea that someone like Mr Stevens might be happy as a single man is not an idea celebrated by literature.
The Remains of the Day will be read as a tragedy, then, by an audience who feels that a single and mostly solitary life is a sad thing. But is Mr Stevens’ life really all that sad? In some ways, absolutely. I find it a tragedy that Mr Stevens dedicated himself to a man who acted badly during the war, and felt unable to stand up for what was right when his employer dismissed two Jewish young women.
But is it equally sad that Mr Stevens remains single and without a sex life of his own?
Well, not if he’s asexual and aromantic. In that case, he has done well to find a station in life which allows him those freedoms, if not others. The life of Mr Stevens is not an all-round tragedy.
Now, two takes from scholars.
MEERA TAMAYA (1992)
Meera Tamaya describes Stevens as “divested of sexuality”, because “an English butler with a sex life is unimaginable”. By this reading, Stevens is “hardly a human being. He tends rapidly toward becoming an object”. This describes “the colonized”. Tamaya sees Stevens’ characterisation as an evolution on what Shakespeare did with acting and clothing and playing roles (masking). In short, Tamaya (writing in 1992) does not see Mr Stevens’ absence of sexuality as part of himself. He has simply learned to be the perfect servant, and Mr Stevens has done this so very well that it affects his entire private life.
Tamaya describes how Mr Stevens’ was born into his station: “In Stevens’ case, he is not only the son of a butler, but he also consciously strives to live up to the ideal of service achieved by his father.”
This fails to capture why Mr Stevens elder had a romantic and sexual life while the younger Mr Stevens did not. The son clearly respects his own father, but has for some other reason (aside from having been born into the servant class) chosen not to follow in his father’s footsteps when it comes to seeking a relationship with a woman. Could it simply be that Mr Stevens is a little too good at his job?
He repudiates all relationships, including the tentative gestures of tenderness by Miss Kenton, and eschews all personal comforts and pleasures, choosing to live in a small, damp, dark, austere room like a monk, because he finds fulfillment, or so he claims, in devotedly serving Lord Darlington the way a novice would serve a god.
— Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back. Modern Language Studies, Vol. 22, №2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 45–56).
By Tamaya’s reading, no one in this vast mansion “has any kind of sex life”, hence the comparison to a monastery. Tamaya calls the residents “inmates”, and includes Lord Darlington in that.
Though I was searching academic papers which used the term “asexual”, Tamaya uses the word “asexual” to describe Lord Darlington, not Mr Stevens as it happens, because the man is “wholly consumed by international politics, doesn’t have any intimate relationship, either with a woman or a man”.
Tamaya includes Mr Stevens in the “asexual” category because he disapproves of romance between domestics.
But this is a pre-21st century usage of the word ‘asexual’ and appears to mean ‘doesn’t have sex’. As is typical of 20th century thinking, ‘not having sex’ is tied to religion and celibacy. Tamaya synonymously uses the word ‘celibate’ in this paper.
Tamaya’s interpretation of Lord Darlington is very interesting because I’d not considered Mr Darlington himself might also be asexual. If anything, I’d witnessed his enjoyment of male peers and considered he might be gay. If Lord Darlington is gay, it makes sense that he seeks to avoid talking to his godson about ‘the birds and the bees’ — the godson is manifestly straight. It is also laughable (as Tamaya points out) that the older men assume a younger man in his early 20s is ignorant when it comes to sexual matters, but makes more sense from an older gay man, since gay men (in those days, at least) often had their first sexual experiences later than straight men did. First sexual experience after the age of 23 is, for a 20th century gay man, I am guessing, not unusual.
Repressing his own (homo)sexuality in a homophobic milieu, Lord Darlington may appear asexual to Stevens, who is so ‘emotionally wedded’ to his master that he, too, feels it necessary to repress any sexuality of his own. Let’s put that out there as a possibility.
Tamaya also points out that, throughout the novel, Stevens has “expounded at…tedious length on the importance of always maintaining one’s dignity, [and] of never revealing one’s emotions in public.” We might easily extrapolate from this that Mr Stevens would never open himself up to the possibility of partnered sex because sex acts might puncture his view of himself as a ‘dignified’ man. Partnered sex might crack the seal on his controlled emotions and carnality.
Whereas I interpret Mr Stevens as Autistic, I wondered what a scholar writing in 1992 might make of his attempts to learn the art of banter as he decides at the end of the story. It seems to me that Mr Stevens has decided to learn a new social script in a very conscious way, revealing that he has been relying on the much narrower script of ‘being a butler’ for his entire life until now, too socially anxious and ill-equipped to try anything spontaneous for fear of social rejection.
Tamaya (not surprisingly) does not go where I went with it — Stevens as minority neurotype — but recognises that this is Mr Stevens’ new attempt at “experiencing human warmth” with his new, more modern master. This is simply a new “trick” he has decided to learn in the hopes of pleasing his American master, Farraday.
SUSIE O’BRIEN (1996)
Scholars repeat the words self-effacement, suppression, repression, and here, self-abnegation, when talking about the characterisation of Mr Stevens.
Susie O’Brien, another scholar, points out yet another way we can interpret Mr Stevens as sexually repressed. Pretty much every scene in the book can serve as evidence of repression:
Stevens’s refusal to acknowledge his “natural” feelings for Miss Kenton is at least partly attributable to his code of dignity, which cannot countenance the possibility of sex, as his earlier, disastrous attempt to explain the “facts of life” to a young guest reveals. Even the suggestion of leisure as implied by the very idea of a holiday is inimical to the principle of self-abnegation to which Stevens has thus far unwaveringly adhered; thus he embarks on the journey with what he describes as “a slight sense of alarm — a sense aggravated by the feeling that [he] was perhaps not on the correct road at all, but speeding off in totally the wrong direction into the wilderness”. Stevens’s sense of an approaching wilderness signals his fear not only of the consequences of unleashing long suppressed sexual feelings but also of a change that constitutes a more devastating threat to his identity.
—O’Brien, Susie. “SERVING A NEW WORLD ORDER: POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S ‘THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 1996, pp. 787–806.
The following is very interesting from an asexual point of view:
It is possible to argue that, to a certain extent, the progress of love is predicated on the progress of history. During the tenure of Lord Darlington, romance is all but forbidden to the loyal employee since, as Stevens explains, “such liaisons [constitute] a serious threat to the order of the house. Farraday’s liberality, by contrast, is a microcosmic reflection of the global democracy hailed by Harry Smith [the doctor who correctly guesses that Stevens is a butler], which permits, and even encourages, the pursuit of individual desire.
— O’Brien, Susie. “SERVING A NEW WORLD ORDER: POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S ‘THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 1996, pp. 787–806.
The asexual community came into existence when it did for a reason, at the turn of the millennium. We can thank the Internet for AVEN, but there’s more to timing than that. The entire second half of the 20th century led towards today’s culture of compulsory sexuality. Until the 1960s, people were heavily sexually repressed. Then the pendulum swung the other way. In my opinion, it is still stuck there — sexuality was once forbidden; now it is required, with too little room for ‘take it or leave it’ — you’re fine as you are.
Farraday’s 1980s interaction with Mr Stevens illuminates Western society’s increasingly liberal view towards sex, and when applied to an extreme, is almost comical. The extreme: An English butler.
For me, though, the butt of the joke is not Stevens — who seems to know he is being laughed at, not with — but the Free Love movement which gave the culture such a strong kick in the pants that, ironically, thrust ‘sexually liberated’ people a bit too far. There’s no more ‘liberation’ in repression than in compulsion.
I do appreciate Susie O’Brien’s take: That this new political order as represented by American Farraday is “potentially coercive”. I would say, definitely coercive, in more ways than one:
The potentially coercive terms of this new political order are finally subordinated to and concealed within the universalist logic of a love story, resistance to which can only be construed as unworldly and finally unnatural. Thus, in the context of Stevens’s lost romantic opportunities, it seems more than a little churlish to point out that, while his employer ha changed, he remains a butler, bound to serve the interests of a new global power.
— O’Brien, Susie. “SERVING A NEW WORLD ORDER: POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S ‘THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 1996, pp. 787–806.
Because as well as the dominant readings of The Remains of the Day, this film can also be read as a critique of the beginnings of compulsory sexuality, as described very well by Sherronda J. Brown in Resisting Compulsory Sexuality. (A highly recommended read.)
THE COMMODIFICATION OF HUMANITY
Compulsory sexuality is a ‘commodification’ of sorts. In The Remains of the Day, Farraday has quite literally ‘purchased’ Stevens along with the house. Stevens is the ultimate human commodity — who resists commodification of his sexual self. That is his one privacy.
It’s interesting to take a close look at how we tend to talk about sexual bodies, especially men’s sexualised bodies. Very often we use the language of machines: “clear out the pipes”, “pump” etc. (I’m sure you can think of many more.)
There’s also this, for those interested in etymology:
“Organized,” “organic,” and “organism” derive from the Greek word for “instrument,” organon. So, when we refer to “organisms,” we implicitly connect ourselves to the tradition of living beings as mechanisms or machines.
— Greg Priest, sharing interesting new piece on the history of the idea of living beings as “organized,” from Galen through “closure of constraints.”
Whenever we have sex we don’t want (or, indeed, whenever we do anything we don’t want), commodification is at play. All too often, we do things for someone else’s pleasure.
The themes of The Remains of the Day are evergreen because, living as we are in an era of compulsory sexuality, people are arguably, as commodified as we ever were.
France has lately been having a conversation about this issue. French nationals use the phrase “ne rien faire”, which means “to do nothing”. Doing nothing is held sacred. The left consider it a human right. In 2023 French politics, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the far left leader) talked about “le droit de marquer la pause dans l’existence” (“the right to a quiet life”.)
Mélenchon said: “You might want to fill the time with poetry, painting, singing or just doing whatever you, as an individual, want to do, rather than what others want you to do. In any case, relentless devotion to productivity is destroying the planet.”
Most of that also applies to one’s sex life. Doing nothing is a perfectly fine option.
IS THE REMAINS OF THE DAY REALLY THE STORY OF LIFE WASTED?
Why should we expect Stevens to change? He is who he is. He’s not just a ‘butler’ — he is an asexual, Autistic butler (by my reading).
Ideally, if he’d been born 100 years later, he’d be afforded his full humanity. He’d have words to describe who he is.
Let’s face it, if 20th century society had acknowledged the existence of aromantic asexuals, Mr Stevens would have been an entirely different person.
To take an example from transgender discourse, Chelsea Bridge had this to say about coming into one’s gender identity: “What we often discover on the other side of transition is that pretransition memories affect us differently than they did before. We might have dissociated through them, recontextualization changes our interpretation, dysphoria alters perception, etc. the past is pseudomutable.”
The same holds true for aces discovering we’re ace. To come out as queer (even to ourselves) is to see the entire world cast in a different light. Memories literally change with the benefit of new information.
Mr Stevens never gets his coming out arc, and so he suppresses and represses other aspects of his life, too, including any thought which might well have affored him the courage to act with moral integrity when faced with the task of firing the Jewish maids, sending them to their likely deaths.
Whereas the allo-allistic, hegemonic-dominant reading of theme in The Remains of the Day uniformly interprets the two plot threads (loyalty to Darlington and rejected romance) as working simultaneously to paint a picture of an entire life wasted on every front, I cannot see Mr Stevens’ life as a single Autistic man as a life wasted at all. A single life is not, in itself, a tragedy.
I think Stevens was fortunate to have found his niche. The fact is, Stevens probably made the best choice for his aroace, Autistic self, in an era when marriage, sex and children was compulsory outside religious and service vocations.
As the story clearly shows, if Mr Stevens had wanted a romantic or sexual relationship, he would have found one. The fact that he didn’t, not once, seek it out is evidence enough of his orientation.
What would have happened had he accepted Miss Kenton’s advances, against his every instinct? Then the story would have been a love tragedy for sure. On top of the unhappiness that compulsory sexuality would inevitably have brought on Mr Stevens himself, Miss Kenton would have also wasted her life. As the story ends, Miss Kenton (now Mrs Benn) is about to start the final phase of her life, which may well prove to be the most rewarding and enjoyable one yet: She is about to become a grandmother. Had Mr Stevens caved to the pressures of allonormative culture and asked for her hand in marriage, I’m confident that she would be feeling even more alone now than she ever was back in the 1930s, sexually and romantically unsatisfied by a man who is solitary by orientation.
What does it mean to be ‘happy’?
MR STEVENS, ENGELS AND FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about an idea called ‘false consciousness’ in regards to workers.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) used the term “false consciousness” in an 1893 letter to Franz Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class wilfully embodies the ideology of the ruling class. Engels dubs this consciousness “false” because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it.
Wikipedia
Basically, workers are engaged in an illusory mind-game in which they believe their lives are meaningful, when all along they’re doing the work for the upper classes, helping them to become more and more prestigious and wealthy. Mr Stevens is simply an extreme example of today’s corporate employee.
For more on false consciousness, see Chapter Five of Sara Ahmed’s book The Promise of Happiness. Ahmed’s main point is that, by adopting norms such as the false consciousness that we are happy when all along we’re working for someone else, we are doing nothing at all to ensure that happiness, as a broad concept, includes everyone.
We can ‘live happily’ (a complicated concept) only when we become revolutionaries, drawing attention to inequality.
By this standard, how many characters are truly ‘happy’ at the end of a story?
The tragedy for Mr Stevens is not that he remains single and sexless (a.k.a. sex free). The tragedy is that he never moves beyond false consciousness. Stevens does eventually realise that his employer was a problematic person, but he sticks to the narrative that no one’s perfect anyway.
The tragedy is not that he ‘failed’ to secure romantic love, but that he failed to secure his own found family to be around him in his final years. Instead, he is left with people who barely know him, and who will likely misunderstand him.
Whenever stories include an aspec character — whether that aspec representation is on the page, off the page or allegorical — hegemonic-dominant audiences tend to view that character’s ‘failure’ to find romance and sex as a failure to self-actualise. This positions aspec lives as tragic.
In contrast, aspec audiences may view “tragic” lives in those very same narratives as quiet triumphs. We take what we can get. Mr Stevens unwittingly played side character to a dangerously powerful man. But he also managed to find comfort and shelter in a world which was never made for the likes of him.
It’s never made sense to me to refer myself as ‘single’, and I’ve always found it odd when people refer to me as that. After all, you’re not born ‘single’, you’re just an individual like everyone else. Then you reach a certain age and you’re not just a person living life, you’re a ‘single’ person living the ‘single’ life. Fortunately, we don’t put a status on friendships,” Benoit concludes, proving that romantic relationships are not the be-all-and-end-all to a person’s life and happiness.
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.
