Future Perfect: the Female Bildungsroman and Prescribed Futures in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Catherine (Ching Wen) Lin
Catherine (Ching Wen) Lin is a first-year student at Bryn Mawr College. A prospective computer science major, she is interested in exploring how technological and scientific developments influence the social construction of identity.
The protagonists of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go are clones whose bodies serve as collections of healthy organs to be harvested and donated as cures to previously fatal diseases. The novel has sometimes been labeled “quasi-science fiction” in recognition of its deviations from dystopian genre conventions, with its near-past setting and its vagueness about the advanced technologies it depicts. Clones, euphemistically called “students,” are raised at the boarding school of Hailsham, a bucolic natural environment where the most modern technology explicitly mentioned in the text – with the exception of the clones themselves – is the Sony Walkman. Hailsham is a fundamentally nostalgic enterprise, as highlighted by its leader Madame’s articulation of her desire for a more emotional past:
When I watched you [Kathy] dancing that day…I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. (Ishiguro 272)
Hailsham’s nostalgia also manifests itself in the retrogressive gender values it teaches students in an effort to socialize them toward normalcy. The character arc of the narrator, Kathy, bears significant resemblance to the protagonists of the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, whom Annis Pratt has described as "growing down" and accommodating themselves to patriarchal norms rather than "growing up” toward independent selfhoods (14). Coming of age, in both Never Let Me Go and the female Bildungsroman, is not a journey of individual self-actualization, but a journey of coming to terms with a socially prescribed future. Both the women and the clones are sites of futurity who are themselves denied futures: Just as the female body is a means of bringing about the future because it can bear children, the clone body brings about the future by enabling a disease-free utopia. In reading Never Let Me Go as a female Bildungsroman, I hope to examine how Kathy manages her aspiration toward alternative futures and ultimately accepts its futility because she is constantly confined by an institutionally promulgated ideology of heteronormativity.
Whether in Jane Austen’s Emma or Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, protagonists of the female Bildungsroman typically move from an initial period of naiveté toward a moment of truth, ultimately either reconciling themselves with the eventuality of marriage and family, or destroying themselves. Like these protagonists, Kathy hurtles toward a socially mandated and inescapable future. In one childhood memory, a Hailsham guardian tells Kathy, “You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.” (Ishiguro 81). Throughout the novel, her path follows the prototypical Bildungsroman narrative, undergoing an initial stage of naive aspiration, a loss of innocence, and finally, a coming of age. Rather than wrestling with the stifling inevitability of marriage and family in a patriarchal world, though, she grapples with accepting her exclusion from heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity is unobtainable to Kathy despite her heterosexuality because of biological and social realities. Biologically, her exclusion from heteronormativity is rooted in both her artificial origins and her inability to reproduce. Socially, the clones’ designated roles in adulthood keep them isolated from potential long-term romantic partners. Kathy frequently emphasizes the constant solitude that characterizes life as a carer: “You spend hour after hour, on your own, driving across the country, centre to centre, hospital to hospital, sleeping in overnights, no one to talk to about your worries, no one to have a laugh with. Just now and again you run into a student you know—a carer or donor you recognise from the old days—but there’s never much time” (207). Even before they “complete,” the novel’s euphemism for death, at reproductive age in their 20s and 30s, the clones are structurally prevented from forming intimate relationships with one another. While the prescribed futures of traditional female Bildungsroman protagonists mandate marriage and family formation, as a clone, Kathy’s prescribed future precludes it.
During Kathy’s childhood at Hailsham, the guardians contradictorily push the students to comprehend and simulate heteronormativity even while knowing that true conformity is inaccessible to them, instilling a futile desire to aspire to the norm. The Hailsham activists aim to convince the world that the clones are not mere bodies by appealing to the concept of the “soul,” revealed through their possession of aesthetic sensibilities and artistic creativity. However, their desire to prove that clones can be raised to become “as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being” (259) causes their preoccupation with simulating normalcy by regulating how students relate to and receive information about their bodies in line with a heteronormative worldview. Consequently, the guardians sometimes teach the students that their sexual differences make them immutably inferior to “normals” (96). In a Hailsham lesson about sex, Miss Emily teaches them that sex matters more to people “out there” because non-clones are “different” and can engage in sexual reproduction (Ishiguro, 84).
Yet, the guardians nevertheless insistently inculcate heteronormativity in the Hailsham students. Strong gender differentiation implicitly characterizes much of life at Hailsham: g irls play rounders indoors; boys play soccer. Kathy describes her group of female friends sitting in the pavilion observing the boys bullying the unpopular Tommy from afar, their social distance underlined by their physical distance. She says, “I realized…whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn’t come into it” (7). Moreover, the guardians police students’ sexual behavior with gender-segregated spaces and other regulations, such as a prohibition on boys and girls from visiting each other’s dorms after nine p.m. While the guardians explain the mechanics of heterosexual sex in meticulous detail — Miss Emily uses a skeleton to graphically demonstrate “all the nuts and bolts of how you did it, what went in where, the different variations,”—they are vague about queer sex (83). In fact, the students are so clueless that they call it “umbrella sex” without any apparent rationale (96). Though the Hailsham activists are well-intentioned, the guardians’ sentimental, nostalgic approach prevents them from accepting the clone bodies as they are — abnormal, futuristic —in favor of imposing a fantasy vision where their inherent queerness is pretended away.
As a result of this ambiguous education, Kathy and the other students learn to suppress abnormal desires in themselves and others, and often express anxieties over deviant sexualities, even while internalizing a belief in their own inherent differences. Kathy states that “accusing someone of ‘getting all umbrella’ could easily end in a fight,” showing how the students enforce heteronormativity willingly among themselves (96). When she is older, Kathy feels ashamed about her promiscuous behavior at the Cottages, demonstrating her wish to perform heteronormative monogamous coupling. Upon arriving at the Cottages, Kathy initially intends to look for a long-term partner, but finds herself experiencing sexual compulsions that result in a string of one-nighters. Kathy mistakenly believes she is uniquely damaged, saying, “I’ve watched other people. They get in the mood for [sex], but that doesn’t make them do things. They never do things like I’ve done, going with people like that Hughie…” (182). Kathy’s ignorance highlights how the guardians train their students to feel ashamed about their own bodily needs. Though the guardians are no doubt aware that these sudden compulsions are an unavoidable part of the clone experience, as Kathy realizes as an adult, this aspect of sexuality is omitted from the curriculum, causing Kathy’s insecurities. Kathy later secretly looks for her “possible,” the model she was cloned from, in porn magazines as a way to understand the sexual compulsions she experiences. Her non-normative origin causes her to identify herself with sexual nonconformists outside of traditional family structures. Her heteronormative education at Hailsham prevents her from embracing this identification, severing her from the body she is taught to care of because it is valuable for others’ exploitation.
The students’ complex blend of aspiration and resignation with regards to their ability to achieve heteronormativity is evident in the myth of the deferral, or the rumor that a couple can defer their donation by several years if they can prove that they are in love. While they subscribe sufficiently to a romantic ideal to believe that true love alone can permit rule-bending, they also harbor no delusions of avoiding their prescribed futures, hoping only to briefly defer it. They are deeply invested in the concept of conformity to authenticity, and never question the idea that love can be validly judged authentic using external, objective societal standards. These attitudes directly reflect the Hailsham activists’ conservatism, which redirects the clones’ aspirations away from equality and towards conformity, neutralizing them and curbing rebellious impulses.
Kathy’s narrative trajectory both reflects and diverges from the protagonists of female Bildungsroman because she similarly obeys a designated life path, though one that prevents her from acting out heteronormative scripts. Nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, which Kathy mentions reading, therefore present mixed messages for the clones, simultaneously encouraging aspiration by providing a paradigm of ideal heterosexuality to replicate, and modelling emotional journeys of accommodation to a prescribed future, albeit one the clones do not share. The students see connections between the “normal” future and their own future of organ donation. When describing how conversations about their futures change adolescence, Kathy draws a direct parallel between donations and sex, noting students explored both attributes of their bodies through jokey allusions. The Victorian novel’s inclusion in the students’ education, as indicated by Kathy’s chosen thesis topic, reflects an underlying tension inherent in the Hailsham project: the guardians’ ambiguity about whether students should emulate “normals” and transcend their status as clones, or whether students should accept their inherent social difference. This ambiguity pervades the students’ upbringing, during which they are both “told and not told” about their prescribed futures. They are given the basic facts about organ harvesting in sterile, euphemistic terms, but unable to examine and emotionally internalize the true, horrific implications of their subhuman status (82).
Within a milieu where heteronormativity is both enforced and rendered inaccessible, Kathy initially engages a period of naïve fantasy, then experiences a loss of innocence, and ultimately resigns herself to the impossibility of heteronormativity, accommodating herself with her prescribed future. As a child, she is fond of a tape of a love song by Judy Bridgewater, which she secretly dances to while hugging a pillow that she imagines is her baby. At this point, she is not yet aware of her own inability to reproduce, and acts out maternal instincts she can never actualize. Later in the novel, Kathy loses her childhood innocence and fully recognizes that heteronormativity is not available to her when she and Tommy try to apply for the deferral, only to be told that it does not exist. This realization brings about true acceptance of her prescribed future as a carer and donor. For Kathy, being the carer of her childhood love is the closest she gets to acting out heteronormative adulthood, and even this limited achievement is possible only because of Kathy’s unique privilege of choosing whom she cares for, attained by dint of an unusually long career as a carer. However, Kathy and Tommy agree to separate before Tommy’s death. Tommy articulates their acknowledgement that it is futile to perform an ersatz version of lifelong marriage, stating, “It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever” (282). Near the end of her life, she accomplishes true reconciliation with the inevitabilities of her life path as a clone. At the novel’s beginning, as she starts to recount her life, she emphasizes her pride in her achievements instead of anger or sadness. She even admits to the reader that she is “boasting” (3) about the quality of her work as a carer, which she focuses on at the expense of her implied imminent death, only briefly mentioning that she will soon begin serving as a donor.
By contrast, Kathy’s close friend Ruth never comes of age because she does not successfully come to terms with her prescribed future, remaining caught up in a world of fantasy and aspiration until her early death. During her stay at the Cottages, she tries to simulate heteronormativity in her coupledom with Tommy, copying mannerisms from sitcoms in order to be like a “normal” family. She hides her deviant sexual experiences, pretending to Kathy that she is always faithful to Tommy and does not experience sudden, severe sexual urges. In fact, Ruth worsens Kathy’s anxieties because Ruth’s apparent success at performing heteronormativity causes Kathy to look to Ruth as a role model and feel negatively about falling short. Ruth continues her pretenses by deliberately creating a fiction that Hailsham students are above the rules, prompting others at the Cottages to speculate that she can truly attain her vividly detailed “dream future” of working in an office (142). Ruth’s search for her possible in an office building differs sharply from Kathy’s search for her possible in porn magazines. In Ruth’s case, the term “possible,” though it refers to a potential genetic match, is strongly evocative of a potential future. Even when she is near death and her past dreams have been proven impossible, she clings to the fantasy of the deferral and hopes to vicariously live out an alternative future through Tommy and Kathy, dying without knowing that this dream is also false. Ruth’s elaborate attempts at pretending away the realities of her body diverge from Kathy’s acceptance, but the two clones share an emotional disconnect from their own bodies rooted in their Hailsham educations, revealing the hidden trauma of their apparently idyllic upbringings.
Kathy also experiences flights of imagination, but she is far more self-conscious of the distinction between dream and reality. At the end of the novel, she momentarily indulges in a fantasy that Tommy, who has now “completed,” is coming toward her. Throughout her retelling, she emphasizes how she remained in control of her emotions, never letting herself go too far. Ultimately, she readies herself to drive “wherever it was [she] was supposed to be,” highlighting her willing compliance with her allotted place in society (288). Unlike Ruth, who imagines possible futures, Kathy finds solace in imagining the past. Her changing attitude toward the Judy Bridgewater tape she loved in her childhood symbolizes her increasing self-restraint as she grows up. While it originally signifies an impossible maternal future, in adulthood, the tape is a source of nostalgia, reminding her of Hailsham and Tommy. Kathy focuses on the past because she has come of age, fully coming to terms with her future.
Never Let Me Go depicts an inverted image of the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist likewise comes of age, but whose body necessarily shuts her out of heteronormativity rather than compels her to enact it. The Hailsham guardians believe they have the clones’ best interests in mind, but their conflation of heteronormativity and humanity and insistence upon teaching traditional gender norms and sexual mores cleaves Kathy from her body. This education suppresses the revolutionary potential of the clones to challenge heteronormativity and other oppressive structures in broader society as non-conforming, stigmatized bodies. Her reactions to her status as a member of an oppressed class, whether aspiring toward heteronormativity or accepting inferiority, preclude true rebellion. Kathy’s and Tommy’s love, albeit a powerful testament to their humanity and resilience, is insufficient to overcome the institutional barriers enforcing their outsider status. The resultant loss of an alternate, radical future for society parallels the clones’ loss of their individual futures. Hailsham may preserve their childhood innocence and grants them pasts to enjoy, but its nostalgia is ultimately revealed to be a feint, a distraction from mourning — and claiming — their stolen futures. The institution’s longing to recreate a purer past limits its social imagination, and by extension, the ambitions of its students. Kathy’s journey of embracing the prescribed future available to her as a clone thus illuminates the limits of sentiment as a basis for bringing about social change.
Bibliography
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