Censorship Essay: The Students At Hailsham

The students at Hailsham, in a sense, understand this. Discussing their possibles, Ruth one of Kathy's best friends claims that we all know it. We're modeled from trash. Junkies, Prostitutes, winos, tramps look down the toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from. Even without the benefit of Miss Emily's historical explanation for their existence, the students arrive at the same interpretation. Ruth's phrasing “modeled from” suggests something different than what is customarily posited when speaking of a clone's relation to its genetic origin. Mice cloned for experiments, for example, are understood to be the same as the mice who provide the source DNA. Ishiguro's locution “modeled from” introduces the possibility of deviation and

The students occasionally see some of their best work disappear before making it to the Exchange; they hypothesize that the guardians and Madame in particular take these works for display in “the Gallery.” In the middle of the novel Miss Lucy tells Tommy: Madame's gallery, yes, that's important. Much more important than once thought, thus validating their hypothesis. The reason, however, is not what the students suspect. Miss Lucy tells Tommy: your art, it is important. And not just because it's evidence . Although Tommy does not know what to make of this yet, the evidence here refers to the students’ humanity. The art is collected in the Gallery in order to prove that the students are human, that they have souls. In Hailsham's humanizing mission, art is the visible proof of humanity. For Miss Emily and the other guardians at Hailsham, aesthetic experience is the sine qua non of humanity, and demonstrating that the students are capable of artistic production is understood as a demonstration of their humanity. As Miss Emily tells Tommy, they took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. This is precisely what she means by a better way of doing things. Hailsham is an improvement, a better way, in two senses. First, the students are genetically modified to avoid socio-political anxieties: cloned from what Ruth calls trash, and modified to lack reproductive capacities, the students are improvements over their genetic sources, provided that by improvement they mean having been made more suitable for their social function, and perhaps even docile in the sense Foucault has given the term. Second, the students reared at Hailsham are improved by being humanized through an aesthetic education. In order for Hailsham's mission to succeed, these students, whose art ideally will prove that they have souls, are improvements over the clones living in deplorable conditions. The novel