Reading the Victorian Novel’s Future in Never Let Me Go

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) exemplifies the contemporary Anglophone novel’s inheritance of the Victorian novel. Specifically, it reworks this historical genre’s thematization of an unchanging present for marginalized subjects. In Ishiguro’s counterfactual Britain, cloned beings are raised for organ harvesting. The predetermined condition of their trajectories applies to countless Victorian heroines. By comparing Ishiguro’s protagonist to the heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), I demonstrate that Ishiguro’s novel recontextualizes a gendered lack of futurity in the Victorian novel. Additionally, I connect pro-clone advocacy in Never Let Me Go to mid-Victorian liberalism. Despite professing objectivity and disinterestedness, the advocates reproduce the British public’s subordination of clones to a class of non-persons. As one of the Victorian novel’s futures, Never Let Me Go illustrates how the Anglophone novel still grapples with unjust experiences of the present while challenging readers’ assumptions of personhood, individuality, and difference.