What Is The Middle-Class In Remains Of The Day?
Introduction
This seminar paper will be dealing with issues of the middle-class in the novel Remains of the Day, more specifically it should elaborate on changing middle-class values.
“It was during the 1950s that the novel first began to register a shift in the previously well-established complicity between literature and the middle-class mindset. They seemed almost like displaced persons, struggling desperately to find room for themselves in a world that is laughingly indifferent to their poise and erudition.”
The plot revolves around Mr. Stevens, a butler, and what is more English than that? The novel is filled with scenery that evokes feelings of greatness, dignity and a certain national pride associated with these values. Certainly, all of these reflect the standards,morals? of aristocracy but the story is essentially being told by a butler. If we assume that the character of a butler is a metaphor for the English citizen then how can we understand Stevens’ doubts about his own dignity?
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* is both an homage to traditional English forms and a dramatic critique of them. It implies that the British Empire was rooted in its subjects' minds, manners and morals, and argues, tacitly, that its self-destructive flaws were embodied in the defensive snobbery, willful blindness role-playing and especially the locutions of its domestic servants.
*address the issue of national identity by portraying local communities that in some way belie the greater conflicts of Britain at large.
*shifting structures of belief, of social values, and
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