When for other reasons the paper went bankrupt, the legal issue remained unresolved and Darlington's reputation was ruined. Much of what Stevens tells us in the middle sections of the novel is about the man he once thought was the epitome of moral worth. Although he is too honest not to provide all the incriminating facts about Darlington, Stevens is still so caught up in his own dream of serving a gentleman of international renown that he keeps trying to paint away the blemishes in his Lordship's portrait.
This pattern of simultaneous admission and denial, revelation and concealment, emerges as the defining feature of the butler's personality. As he pompously and, for us, humorously recollects some of his triumphs in service, he also describes incidents that allow us to glimpse layers of guilt and a capacity not always conscious for self-questioning.
On two occasions he tells anecdotes about recent encounters during which he went so far as to deny that he had worked for Lord Darlington. He also confesses to having made some serious errors in his daily rounds, slips caused by age but also, a reader has to feel, by some subterranean feeling of doubt about the course of his life.
Most troubling are his accounts of the death of his father, the dismissal of the Jewish housemaids and his relationship with the high-spirited Miss Kenton, who tried to get him to respond to her affection.
In all these instances, Stevens had suppressed his feelings; he has retreated from the unruly forces of death, politics and love by claiming to be following a principle of order higher than that of narrow individualism. In the last section of the novel, Stevens does have two very brief and extraordinarily moving moments of self-recognition: one when Miss Kenton confesses that she wishes she had married him, and he speaks for the first time of sorrow and heartbreak; and the other when, in a conversation with a stranger on the pier at Weymouth, he is again stirred to talk about his attachment to Lord Darlington:.
He wasn't a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that.
You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted that I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that? Yet, even through the shivery pathos of Stevens' recognition of his misguided idealism and barren life, the wry comedy remains. With so long a history of self-deception, the butler can only respond to this impasse by deftly creating still another innocent fiction that will allow him to suppress feeling and knowledge in pursuit of a newly revised ideal of service.
As ever, director James Ivory makes ingenious use of real locations. It's generally open to the public, but you can hire the house as a wedding venue. Powderham Castle , a medieval pile dating from set in a deer park, supplied more interiors.
The house, which was damaged during the Civil War, restored and much altered in the 18th and 19th centuries, is now the home of Lord and Lady Courtenay , and open to the public. Stevens has always been attached to the house, and his journey away from this "hub" exposes the absurdity of the so-called humane order revolving around Darlington Hall. In fact, Ishiguro places pivotal moments of Stevens' journey in architectural structures that physically diminish as he moves closer towards a realization of his own inadequate, wasted life: from Darlington Hall, to the small, "cosy" Taylor residence in Moscombe, to the bus stop in Weymouth "Inside, the paint was peeling everywhere, but the place was clean enough" , to the bench on the pier where the "lights have come on" Virginia C.
Kenny unintentionally illustrates the problems associated with the English country house as a symbol of civility and benign power when she writes, "The country-house ethos had the greater efficacy as a unifying metaphor because its setting - the country-house itself - was so palpably a functioning entity, bearing witness to the reality of the fusion of past, present and future social values in an everchanging but seemingly unbreakable continuum" The Country-House Ethos in English Literature , In this myth of a "functioning entity", characters like Stevens and Lord Darlington fade into labyrinthine back corridors.
In Ishiguro's rendering those people who make the house function, such as Stevens, and those who attempt to ensure the continuum of certain unnamed social values, such as Lord Darlington, divorce the myth from the house and place it properly in the hands of people.
Anita Desai similarly plays on this idea of the house as continuum in In Custody when she relates the destruction of an Urdu literary tradition to the destruction of Prof. Siddiqui's family villa, the last visible remnant in Mirpore of Urdu's glorious history.
Desai also focuses on the detrimental effects to family, community, and literature incured by women's continued exclusion from traditionally male realms and their limited power even within the house. Stevens' stay at the Taylor residence in Moscombe and his subsequent political discussion with Mr. Harry Smith, contrasts starkly with Stevens' interpretation of Darlington Hall's function in the political landscape: "the great decisions of the world are not, in fact, arrived at simply in the public chambers, or else during a handful of days given over to an international conference under the full gaze of the public and the press.
Rather, debates are conducted, and crucial decisions arrived at, in the privacy and calm of the great houses of this country. What occurs under the public gaze with so much pomp and ceremony is often the conclusion, or mere ratification, of what has taken place over weeks or months within the walls of such houses.
To us, then, the world was a wheel, revolving with these great houses at the hub, their mighty decisions emanating out to all else, rich and poor, who revolved around them" Despite its rough edges, the Taylor house with its combination dining and living room that Ishiguro describes as "a rather cosy room, dominated by a large, roughly hewn table of the sort one might expect to see in a farmhouse kitchen" , marks a public realm where people engage in political discussion with as much sincerity and seriousness as those dignitaries attending the Darlington Hall conference.
Stevens inadvertently exposes that element of the country house myth which asserts that the manor reflects qualities its owners desire to appear as possessing when he allows the Moscombe group to believe that he worked on foreign political policy; Stevens' mere proximity to Darlington Hall, regardless of his position within it, lets him briefly don the aura of importance that the house ostensibly exudes.
It is gradually revealed—largely through other characters' interactions with Stevens, rather than his own admissions—that Lord Darlington, due to his mistaken impression of the German agenda prior to World War II, sympathized with the Nazis. Darlington even arranged and hosted dinner parties between the German and British heads of state to help both sides come to a peaceful understanding. Stevens always maintains that Lord Darlington was a perfect gentleman, and that it is a shame his reputation has been soiled simply because he misunderstood the Nazis' true aims.
During the trip Stevens also recounts stories of his contemporaries—butlers in other houses with whom he struck up friendships. Stevens's most notable relationship by far, however, is his long-term working relationship with Miss Kenton. Though Stevens never says so outright, it appears that he harbors repressed romantic feelings for Miss Kenton. Despite the fact that the two frequently disagree over various household affairs when they work together, the disagreements are childish in nature and mainly serve to illustrate the fact that the two care for each other.
At the end of the novel, Miss Kenton admits to Stevens that her life may have turned out better if she had married him.
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