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.She s engaged in that struggle.She s attempting to deal with herown racism and classism.But it ain t simple, you know.Because it reinforcesitself when you have the racial privilege and class privilege and she has both. 25Her determination to expunge her racism appears to have been the unstatedreason for her decision to marry Woodrow.Hannah later rejoices that her children fought with Johnson to revenge theirfather s death.In the falling out between Johnson and Taylor, America appearedto have switched its support to Johnson, but Taylor s more monstrous violenceprevailed.26 The fate of Hannah s boys, who became famous teenage killingmonsters known as Worse-than-Death, Fly, and Demonology, becomerepresentative of how America lost control of the explosive situation.Just asAmerica loses control of the civil war against Doe, Hannah loses her childrento the nightmare violence.When she secretively returns to Liberia to discovertheir fate, her children and the chimpanzees have died.Yet at the end, she canrejoice that her sons died fighting to avenge their father and American interests.Hannah imagines consolingly that her sons join their African ancestors.Hannahadmits to the missionary Crowns couple (who now fondly regard Taylor becausehe s converted to evangelical Christianity) that she was Taylor s enemy andbecause she s white, they help her escape from Liberia by plane.Hannah s reali-zation that the story of her life can have no significance in the world illustratesthe renunciation of her ambition and presents the complete opposite of Owen snarcissistic rationalization that he was the most significant player at HarpersFerry narcissism deals in absolutes, as does propaganda.Hannah was a savvy and privileged American darling, not a naïve and pro-vincial Russian darling.Once more, Banks employs a metatext in counterpoint.The Darling offers a new departure for Banks a political thriller in the traditionof Greene, the travel writer and popular novelist who was one of England s topspies.After Hannah retires, she sees no significance in her life amid the largerworld.The word darling may be used in many ways, including the ambivalentway she concludes her oblique confession.Banks s novel is not incompetent assome reviewers have hinted, but an ironic puzzle that challenges the reader tounravel the political plot and assemble the truth in the fractured mirror shardsof Hannah s life, a technique he employed embryonically in his first apprenticenovel Family Life.Hannah does anything a man can do and more, in bearing children.By theend of the novel, she becomes existential she would like to find meaning in170 Russell Banks: In Search of Freedomher life story, but can t.At her husband s grave, Hannah waits for her husband sghost to rise and punish her because she feels guiltily responsible for his death,since she realizes that her plan to help her husband and America has backfired.At this moment of purgative grief, the reader realizes that Hannah has finallydestroyed the narcissistic envelope she has lived within.She s arrived at the place of an existential hero in an immoral world andcontinues to be confused emotionally and intellectually on how to deal withit, yet any reader cannot help but notice that on a practical level, Hannah hassurvived to become a better person despite her delusions and sins.Hannahretreats to a comfortable rural seclusion like a hermit philosopher with her twodogs, arriving at a resigned acceptance of diffident cynicism as she tries to dothe best she can, relating with other people in the last days of her life, no longera political player and nearly self-confident enough to tell the world of her embar-rassing and tragic follies the most embarrassing of which was that her seductionby Taylor destroyed her family, her ideals, and the nation she tried to help.Banks encourages the reader to grow fond of Hannah, yet some reviewersclaim Hannah remains such a distant and dispassionate mystery that shehardly seems real:Because Hannah always remains something of a representative figure, she neverbecomes a completely palpable individual; there remains about her the whiff ofthe synthetic, a sense that she is more symbol than human being.27It s true that Hannah appears distant, reserved, and reluctant to open her heartto the reader, but she eventually does so, yet this approach demands muchpatience on the part of any reader.In the concluding fifth section, her emotionsexplode when Hannah finally arrives at closure, In the new history of America,mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from thebeginning. 28 She was everyone s darling: her father s darling, the darling ofthe Weather Underground, her husband s darling, Charles Taylor s darling, andthe darling of the American government as the CIA operative Clement calls her.But by the end of the novel, in a reversal of her making, Hannah arrives at thepoint where she s nobody s darling, nor does she wish to be anyone s darling.Hannah copes better with life in her retirement.Like Scobie in Greene s TheHeart of the Matter, Hannah fails in her goals.But unlike Scobie, who commitssuicide, Hannah is a strong character who survives her failure.Banks describesHannah as, a person who has lived through tragic events and has been deeplymarked by them, a person who has suffered a great deal but not as a victim.She s simply too powerful to think of as a victim. 29 Because of this, one caneventually warm to her and accept her with all her considerable flaws as anAmerican experiment in good intentions gone wrong, something Banksremains consistently interested in:One thing I m very interested in an on-going way is the unintended consequence ofgood intentions.And that, you can see that most particularly perhaps in The Darling,but also Cloudsplitter, but going back even further to Continental Drift or Affliction.30Radical Irony: The Darling 171Just as a reader might eventually warm up to the plight of Jane Austen sheroine in Emma (1816) by the end of that novel, a reader might be willing toaccept the failures of Hannah
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