Closeted Queerness in Remains of the Day
My introduction to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Remains of the Day, was the 1993 film adaptation of the book brought to the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions, the film company founded by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in 1961. Merchant and Ivory were partners from the early 1960s until Merchant’s death in 2005, but they were not particularly candid about the romantic nature of their relationship during Merchant’s lifetime. As Ivory, who had just won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name, explained in The Guardian in 2018, “Well you just wouldn’t discuss [your relationship with another man]. That is not something that an Indian Muslim would every say publicly or in print. Ever! You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay with a deeply conservative Muslim family there. It’s not the sort of thing he was going to broadcast.”
While this post will (mostly) focus on the novel, I bring up Merchant and Ivory’s adaptation because I believe one of the reasons they were drawn to the source material is the same reason I am: Stevens, the protagonist, represses his emotions and is almost constantly performing. Stevens engages in these behaviors out of a warped sense of commitment to his position as a butler but sustained emotional repression and nonstop performance are also intimately familiar experiences for any queer person who has spent time in the closet. In fact, I believe that this connection is so deeply embedded into the DNA of this film that I mistakenly thought it had been referenced in The Celluloid Closet, a documentary that details the history of the representation of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people on film.
For those who are unfamiliar with Remains of the Day, it is narrated in first person by Stevens, a butler who worked for Lord Darlington and later Mr. Farraday at Darlington Hall. Stevens journeys to the West Country where he hopes to convince Darlington’s former housekeeper, Miss Kenton (now, Mrs. Benn), to return to her old post. After receiving a letter from her, Stevens thinks that Miss Kenton’s nostalgia for Darlington Hall may implicitly indicate a desire to resume her position.
The two main narrative threads that Stevens recounts from the pre-WWII days at Darlington Hall are the evolution of his relationship to Miss Kenton and his role in preparing a series of diplomatic meetings hosted by Lord Darlington at his estate. According to Stevens, Herr Ribbentrop, a Nazi diplomat, manipulated Darlington’s honorable aim of re-negotiating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles—which Darlington believed were too harsh on Germany—so that Ribbentrop could gain access and influence over British and French diplomats. Stevens took his duties related to these conferences especially seriously because he believed it would give him a small part to play in altering the course of history. He wasn’t wrong. He ended up sacrificing his personhood in the hopes that he would have a hand in changing the world, but he ended up aiding and abetting someone who was so naïve that his own misplaced sense of honor was taken advantage of by Nazis.
It may sound exaggerated to suggest that Stevens sacrificed his personhood for the sake of his career, but I think this passage demonstrates the extent to which Stevens diminished himself so as to better serve the aristocracy:
And of course, any butler who regards his vocation with pride, any butler who aspires at all to a “dignity in keeping with his position,” as the Hayes Society once put it, should never allow himself to be “off duty” in the presence of others. […] A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume. There is one situation and one situation only in which a butler who cares about his dignity may feel free to unburden himself of his role; that is to say, when he is entirely alone.
By Stevens’s own logic, he could never even reveal his true self to a lover, a friend, or a family member. We learn the extent to which Stevens follows this principle when he describes the time when his father fell gravely ill on the evening of one of Lord Darlington’s biggest and most important conferences. Stevens states that he learned much about the notion of “dignity” from watching his father’s own commitment to service, yet while Stevens’s father is able to tell his son that he hopes he has been a good father to him before he dies, all Stevens can manage to do is stupidly repeat, “I’m very glad Father is feeling better.” Stevens actually remembers the night primarily as an achievement; he believes that in not succumbing to his emotions, even immediately after he learned of his father’s death, he reached a “turning point” in his professional development.
This memory, and Stevens’s pride in it, reveals how taxing it is for him to always be “on duty.” He cannot even display sentiment toward his father—for whom, at the very least, he has a deep respect—on his deathbed. Like Stevens’s relentless dedication to professionalism, the performance of heterosexuality is also an all-consuming task. A person’s sexuality may seem like just a small portion of his identity, but people make assumptions about others’ sexualities from a host of minute cues—voice, posture, dress, hairstyle, body language, interests and hobbies, etc. One must constantly monitor all of these things, and more, for fear of making a revealing mistake that clues someone in to who he really is. Likewise, Stevens pays careful attention to his dress, his command of language, and myriad other infinitesimal details to optimize himself for service in every conceivable way. Stevens, and any person who regulates his behavior to such a meticulous degree, must experience profound isolation because they can never be truly known by anyone.
It seems that Miss Kenton is one of the few people Stevens has encountered in his life who cared enough about him to attempt to expose his elaborate façade. The scene that I thought was in The Celluloid Closet portrays one such moment from the book. Rather than quote the entire passage, I will embed a clip of the scene here:
There are two things I’d like to point out here. First, Stevens is desperately uncomfortable with Miss Kenton encroaching on his personal time because she has caught him by surprise at one of the few moments when he allows himself to remove his veneer of service. The nature of the book he’s reading only heightens his vulnerability because he thinks Miss Kenton learning that he may occasionally fantasize about romantic love will undermine his authority and credibility as a butler. Second, there was a change in the atmosphere when Miss Kenton cornered Stevens, “almost as though the two of” them “had been suddenly thrust onto some other plane of being altogether.” That atmospheric shift is clear both in the novel and in the film; Miss Kenton’s tacit flirtation and Stevens’s refusal to match her intimacy creates a thick sexual tension. In the director and producer commentary track for the film, Emma Thompson observes that Stevens looked at Miss Kenton’s mouth, and that his hand was positioned so it looked as if he was about to caress Miss Kenton’s hair. Stevens was on the precipice of action, but as Thompson puts it, he “just can’t bring himself to do it”—he must restrain himself from expressing his desire to maintain his exacting portrait of professionalism.
Perhaps an even more compelling argument for Stevens’s embodiment of the turmoil that queer people in the closet experience is the way he swallows his feelings so as not to be overwhelmed by the immensity of a desire which can never be realized. This emotional restraint is reflected in a series of encounters Stevens had with Miss Kenton on the evening she gave him her notice that she was leaving Darlington Hall and moving to the West Country with her fiancé. First, after Miss Kenton told Stevens that she might accept her acquaintance’s proposal on that evening, she accused him of attempting to persuade her of missing her appointment by stomping around the kitchen—which Stevens denies, though he is likely misrepresenting what happened. Then, upon Miss Kenton’s return, Stevens blithely congratulated her on her engagement without expressing remorse for her possible departure. Miss Kenton responded to his callous indifference by telling Stevens that she and her acquaintance mocked him during their nights out. Later in the evening, Miss Kenton apologized but Stevens pretended that her remark was so insignificant that he didn’t remember it. Shortly afterward, Stevens returned through the same corridor where Miss Kenton’s room was situated. Stevens remembers the moment as follows:
As I approached Miss Kenton’s door, I saw from the light seeping around its edges that she was still within. And that was the moment, I am now sure, that has remained so persistently lodged in my memory – that moment as I paused in the dimness of the corridor, the tray in my hands, an ever-growing conviction mounting within me that just a few yards away, on the other side of that door, Miss Kenton was at that moment crying. As I recall, there was no real evidence to account for this conviction – I had certainly not heard any sounds of crying – and yet I remember being quite certain that were I to knock and enter, I would discover her in tears. I do not know how long I remained standing there; at the time it seemed a significant period, but in reality, I suspect, it was only a matter of a few seconds.
All of these encounters were punctuated by Stevens’s preparation for a meeting between Lord Darlington, the British Prime Minister, and the German Ambassador. Miss Kenton definitively learns from these exchanges where Stevens’s priorities lie. Stevens, for his part, felt “somewhat downcast” after leaving Miss Kenton’s door without inquiring after her, but then as he stood by waiting to satisfy the whims of the diplomats, “a deep feeling of triumph started to well up within” him. I believe that this sense of achievement Stevens experienced had less to do with his role in Darlington’s intervention in foreign policy, and more to do with having conquered the greatest test of his devotion to service ever—the choice between comforting Miss Kenton and fulfilling his duties at the highest possible standard. Of course, Stevens does not make this connection himself—the fact that he gave up the only woman who ever loved him for a man who consorted with Nazis would be too painful a truth to reconcile.
Hopefully as time marches forward, Stevens’s emotional repression and performance will be experiences less familiar to queer audiences, but for now he serves as an excellent corollary for understanding the isolation they feel when censor themselves to be accepted.
