The figure of the butler, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is a subtle illustration of the ability of human consciousness to deceive itself in what Sartre called “bad faith.” The self-deception is enhanced by being legitimized in the framework of a professional ethics. This ethics of the “dignity” of a job perfectly well accomplished, which  is presented as nothing but blind obedience, not only leads to the character’s failure in his life but, more dangerously, to his serving as an instrument of evil action. Indirect commentary on latter aspect of the novel can be sought in Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith” and Marx’s of the alienated consciousness but also in the experiments in social psychology conducted by Stanley Milgram which point to the mechanisms by which ordinary people can become agents of mass destruction.

Reading some well-known childhood poems by Blake and Wordsworth, the article challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as opposites. Instead, the article offers a reading that unravels the residues of Puritan and catechetical thinking in texts by two of the earliest advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality. Though denouncing authoritarian and catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s speech is silenced, Blake and Wordsworth, writing at a moment of cultural transition, construct the child in a way that indicates a failure of their own declared purpose of redeeming the child’s perspective and voice as valuably distinct from those of the adult. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake’s poetic child is sometimes restored to him, the child is made a spokesman of a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Similarly in Wordsworth, the construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic and autobiographical Self denies the child its valuable difference through an adult voice’s ongoing narcissistic ventriloquism. The adult speaker’s idealization of the child’s freedom is ambiguated by the implicit association of freedom with parental neglect, which involves a disregard of the child’s perspective. Thus, in contrast to the declared agenda of the poems, they also imply a desire that the child be less liberated and more regulated by the adult world.

Galia Benziman is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her research focuses on the work of Victorian authors, especially Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, on the history of childhood, and on the English elegy. Her first book, Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture, was published in 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her second book, Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Poetry and Prose: Codes of Bereavement, came out in 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays appeared in Partial Answers, Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and other journals.    

Updated in March 2019