“My country, my enemy”: representing and questioning American politics through radical activism in The Darling by Russell Banks

Abstract

In the novel The Darling, published by Russell Banks in 2004, a young American woman, Hannah Musgrave, decides to rebel against her bourgeois upbringing in the 1960s by embracing the radicalism of the Weather Underground. After being accused of terrorism, she has to live under a fake name and she eventually flees the United States to settle in Liberia. This article aims at studying the ways in which Banks draws on his fictional character’s personal experience to question the impact of revolutionary ideals on American society. The protagonist’s multiple identities, which reflect the political upheavals and the inner conflicts of her country, as well as the constant blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction enable Banks to offer a complex reflection on the building and the staging of American political history in the second half of the twentieth century.

Keywords

• United States
• history
• activism
• politics
• rebellion