Pauline’s kidnapping and confinement

Pauline’s kidnapping and confinement become a public test of whether a captive can speak for herself, or whether others will define her as victim, convert, or criminal. The cadre’s demands make her a political symbol; her recorded declarations present her as a willing comrade; and the later legal and media narratives recast her as a damaged prisoner. The novel keeps these interpretations in tension, while showing that the consequences of the episode fall differently on Pauline and Jenny.

Abduction and the Public Demand

The kidnapping enters the narrative as part of a rapid sequence of events: over four months, The cadre abducts the daughter of a prominent San Francisco family, claims to bring her into its cause, robs a bank, and is believed to have been killed in a confrontation with police in Los Angeles. Their deaths produce public mourning and renewed attention to their politics. At a memorial rally, Sandy, who had previously been too shy to speak publicly at an antiwar demonstration, delivers a forceful speech. As the crowd disperses, a disheveled young woman tells her that she knew the dead comrades and that there are still ways to help. The revelation that three members believed dead have survived turns Sandy’s public sympathy into a dangerous, reluctant connection to the fugitives.

The captive’s family and the authorities initially frame the abduction as a crime against a young woman who must be rescued. Jenny, however, corrects a friend who describes Pauline as a little girl: she is a nineteen-year-old college student, though her age does not make the kidnapping permissible. The distinction matters because Pauline is both a person subjected to force and the intended subject of the group’s political message. A later discussion between Jenny and Pauline describes the seizure as an armed removal from her home while she was wearing a bathrobe, a circumstance that makes the group’s professed politics difficult to separate from the way it exercises power over her.

The ransom demand is extensive and ideological. The cadre asks that a week’s worth of healthy food be distributed, without strings or administrative hurdles, to Californians below the poverty line and to people facing other forms of social marginalization. Distribution is to begin within a week and continue for at least a month, preferably through ordinary supermarkets rather than government agencies or record-keeping institutions. The food is presented as a goodwill gesture before ransom negotiations, not as the ransom itself. Pauline’s recorded voice conveys the demand, with pauses as she turns pages, making the broadcast sound both scripted and uncertain.

Her family responds publicly with apparent willingness to comply, but stresses the difficulty of defining and reaching everyone who qualifies. Its estimate of the cost rises to half a billion dollars’ worth of food, and her father says he cannot meet that total but will do what he can. The cadre’s next tape accepts his promise to do his best, while insisting that the political argument should not be dismissed as madness. That exchange makes the demand a contest over who controls its meaning: the family presents it as impractical, while the kidnappers present it as an argument about poverty and capitalism.

Captivity, Choice, and Competing Interpretations

Public reaction does not settle the question of Pauline’s wishes. Left-leaning commentators criticize the food proposal as grandstanding and paternalistic, and some describe the kidnapping as a sign of a movement in decline. Jenny feels both shame and defensiveness: she can see the demand’s impracticality, yet resents the ease with which the group’s opponents use that failure to dismiss its political commitments. The kidnapping gives her a sense of belonging to a nation within the larger country, even as it exposes that movement to public rejection.

On April 3, 1974, another broadcast presents Pauline with a choice between rejoining her family and remaining with The cadre. She declares that she will stay with the group, identifies the comrades as her family, and takes the name Pauline for her new life. Jenny hears the tape while driving near Red Hook. The announcement closes off, for her, the imagined possibility that the crisis might open a path back to her own former life. The news commentators instead treat Pauline’s decision as evidence of coercion. At home, Dolly calls her brainwashed; Jenny asks how anyone can know that Pauline does not agree with the group. Dolly’s answer rests on Pauline’s background and social position: in her view, a girl from such a family could not genuinely side with the revolutionaries. The disagreement exposes how readily class can be used to disqualify a captive’s stated choice.

The novel also places Pauline within the apartment where Frazer meets The cadre. The three fugitives are surrounded by disorder and appear deprived of food and light. Juan directs the negotiation, while Yvonne’s reaction suggests dissatisfaction with his control of the conversation; Pauline sits with a shotgun. The arrangement makes visible the contradiction at the heart of the episode: she is the person the group abducted, yet she is also physically present among its armed members and is being presented to the outside world as one of them. The scene does not resolve whether her public statements express free commitment, pressure, or some changing mixture of both.

From Captive to Comrade

Two weeks after the April broadcast, The cadre robs a bank and takes fifteen thousand dollars to fund its political project. Pauline is visible on the security recordings. Her appearance is read in sharply different ways, as evidence either of brainwashing or of unsettling composure. The bank belongs to a prominent business partner of her father. The group then evades the dragnet, while the attorney general declares Pauline a criminal rather than a crime victim and issues a wanted poster bearing her face. Her family protests, and public responses divide between those who display the poster in sympathy and those who scold them for doing so.

Pauline’s later life with Jenny gives the transition out of captivity a further dimension. She encourages women to learn about firearms, arguing that understanding weapons can challenge the ignorance and dependence cultivated in relations with men. Jenny, Sandy, Joanne, and Lena begin with the parts of guns, ballistics, and the uses of different weapons; they dismantle and clean a shotgun together. The activity becomes a shared practice of learning without pretending to know in advance. For Pauline, the knowledge gained among The cadre becomes something she can recast as women’s education rather than simply an instrument of the group’s armed struggle.

That change also generates conflict. Pauline argues that male revolutionaries, including William, have pursued political change through methods shaped by masculine dominance and violence. She connects that pattern to her own abduction by male comrades. Jenny rejects the idea that men are naturally destined to act in those ways, comparing it to the claim that domestic labor is women’s nature. Their disagreement shows that Pauline’s experience as a captive remains active in her political thinking: she does not merely repeat the cadre’s program, but reinterprets its conduct through the question of women’s authority and leadership.

Legal Aftermath and Unequal Consequences

After Pauline is captured, lawyers, doctors, family spokespeople, and brainwashing experts compete to describe her condition. They report severe malnutrition, flat speech, hallucinations, and an initial inability to recognize members of her family; her lawyers use these claims in seeking bail. The judge denies her first request. A later motion includes testimony from someone who knew her during the period called the lost year and supports the claim that Pauline was an unwilling prisoner rather than a willing participant in crimes. Public images of her declaring revolutionary allegiance, however, remain part of the case’s competing record.

The novel ultimately contrasts Pauline’s punishment with Jenny’s. Pauline is convicted of the bank robbery, serves less than two years before her sentence is commuted, and emerges with the stigma of prison largely unable to attach to her. Her ordeal is treated as an adventure from which she can return, reinforcing rather than undoing her class privilege. Jenny receives the minimum sentence for her participation in the selective-service recruitment-center bombings and is transferred to work release after a year for good behavior. Instead of feeling simply fortunate, she experiences the praise and privileges given to her as racialized condescension, as if she were being rewarded for exceeding low expectations. The two women’s different legal treatment therefore cannot be explained by their charges alone.

Their time together is also largely erased from the legal record: they are tried and sentenced only for acts committed before they met. No one is charged with Mr. Morton’s murder. In this disjunction between conduct, conviction, and public interpretation, the kidnapping’s consequences exceed the question of whether Pauline was a victim or a participant. Her captivity becomes a story repeatedly revised by the family, the press, the state, and the women themselves; the unequal terms of those revisions reveal how class, race, political identity, and criminal status shape whose choices are believed and whose suffering can be made to disappear.