The Butler Who Married His Lordship: Feminine Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

Abstract

[Abstract] Darlington Hall epitomises a political arena that corresponds to what John Ruskin describes as the male public sphere. The main actors in this sphere are Lord Darlington and Stevens, who both regard their activities as a form of service to humanity. Nevertheless, if we analyse Stevens’s behaviour not only in the light of Freud’s theories about idealisation and love as explained in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and On Narcissism: An Introduction, but also through the cultural and custom sources that deal with the condition of menservants and wives in the Victorian age, it would appear that Stevens’s social sex role conforms more to Ruskin’s concept of the feminine. Stevens and Darlington would form a virtual couple, where the former has the role of the wife and the latter that of the husband.