Jenny’s disillusionment with political violence

Jenny’s disillusionment with political violence is a gradual reckoning with what her earlier certainty concealed: that anger helped drive her actions, that their nonfatal outcomes owed much to chance, and that righteous intentions could not guarantee justice. In prison, the contrast between her past faith in purposeful violence and her new uncertainty extends beyond her bombings with William to the different punishments she and Pauline receive, the deaths for which no one is charged, and the unresolved question of how to act in an unjust world.

From Anger to Political Doubt

Jenny comes to understand that her protest against the war had been powered not only by outrage at the state of the world but also by anger at her own apparent insignificance. She had wanted powerful men to feel remorse and had hoped that protest might bring concrete changes, including feeding the poor and withdrawing tanks. Looking back from prison, she sees that her carefully reasoned choices had been saturated with rage. Her earlier belief that she and William would have made the same choices even in separate lives had supported the idea that their political actions were expressions of a shared, almost self-evident conviction. Now she recognizes another part of the arrangement: she had entrusted William with channeling her fury and turning it into action. Their intimacy had made it easier to overlook the anger that animated them both.

This reassessment does not reduce Jenny’s earlier politics to a single motive. She had rejected violence as a means of provoking government repression or as a route to assassination, yet she had believed it could reliably seize attention and lead others toward understanding. In her cell, she has to consider that the same acts might also have served vengeance. The possibility unsettles her precisely because she had regarded her actions as more carefully justified than those of people whose motives she judged less pure. She now sees that a claim to justice can coexist with a wish to retaliate, even when an act is planned to avoid people and presented as symbolic.

Chance, Harm, and the Limits of Intention

The monk whose self-immolation Jenny had seen on the news returns to her thought as a challenge to her former faith in political shock. She had understood the act as forcing others to see a reality they might otherwise ignore. In retrospect, she wonders whether she misunderstood its meaning, and whether the image also conveyed the futility of believing that passion for a cause could make one’s intervention sufficient. The memory unsettles her earlier confidence that a shocking act could reliably produce political understanding.

Her reassessment turns especially on luck. Jenny and William had taken pride in acting carefully, but she recognizes that the buildings they bombed had remained empty partly through chance, not because their intentions had made the outcomes safe. She compares the assumption that a building would be empty with the assumption that a village would contain only enemies: both can overlook civilians. Her luck meant no employee returned to a targeted building after midnight for a forgotten coat. She can no longer treat the absence of a fatal outcome as proof that she acted rightly. The same logic makes her reconsider Mr. Morton’s death: rather than explaining it solely through Juan’s motives, she has to admit that bad luck may have been decisive. No one is charged with the killing, leaving the difference between intention, responsibility, and consequence unresolved rather than neatly settled by a verdict.

The shift is ethical as well as political. Jenny concludes that lofty intentions do not determine the moral meaning of an act; outcomes matter, and good intentions may be accompanied by disastrous results or spared from them only by chance. Her bombings no longer appear exalted simply because she meant them as protest. She sees anger circulating among people on opposing sides: at the abuses of the nation, at subversives, among men returning from war, and among people affected by the conflict in Vietnam. The people to whom she had felt pledged had often remained abstractions to her, as Mr. Morton had. She now imagines him as a particular person, a shopkeeper whose limited eyesight makes it harder for him to understand the danger confronting him. That sharpened recognition of an individual life breaks through the impersonal categories that had helped make political violence seem defensible.

Learning, Gender, and a Different Kind of Change

Jenny’s doubts also develop alongside a change in how she understands political transformation. After recoiling inwardly from Mike Sorsa’s suggestion that she meet new comrades, she begins to see how other people might regard the women’s weapons group: not simply as a source of courage and capability, but as violent and courting destruction. The experience had made Pauline and the other women feel more capable; Jenny does not deny that change. Instead, she grows less convinced that revolution means assembling enough force to topple a system. She begins to imagine it as the slower work of changing individual minds, or as an uncommon opportunity to try.

The group’s learning provides a revealing contrast. Its early activities included studying the parts of firearms, ballistics, and the kinds of guns suited to different purposes. Jenny finds pleasure in learning together with other women, asking questions, making lists, and acknowledging what they do not know. The experience makes visible a gendered expectation she and the others had often accommodated: around men, they had felt pressure to appear knowledgeable already, even when they were still catching up. For Jenny, this pattern had been bound up with love and with the effort to become the woman William wanted. Learning among women offers a different experience—not mastery performed in advance, but the shared pleasure of encountering something for the first time. That discovery supports a political vision grounded in changed relations and understanding, even as the weapons themselves keep the question of violence in view.

The same discussion sharpens Jenny’s disagreement with Pauline. They have recognized that women commonly follow rather than lead in revolutionary movements, and Pauline argues that women must assume leadership. But Pauline interprets William’s methods through the gendered violence of her own kidnapping, seeing both as examples of men pursuing change in a backward, masculine way. Jenny resists treating men as naturally destined to act in a particular fashion, just as women should not be said to do housework by nature. Her objection complicates the break with her former politics: she can question William’s methods without accepting a fixed account of what men or women are capable of. The disagreement leaves political change open as a contested practice rather than a set of inherited roles.

Punishment, Privilege, and the Cost of Disillusionment

The legal outcomes for Jenny and Pauline deepen Jenny’s doubts about how responsibility and punishment correspond. Pauline will be convicted of bank robbery and serve less than two years before her sentence is commuted. Although the press describes her as receiving a severe sentence, she emerges without prison’s stigma, and her experience ultimately appears to reinforce rather than undo her class privilege. Jenny, by contrast, receives the minimum sentence for participating in the selective-service recruitment-center bombings and is transferred to work release after a year for good behavior. The comparatively lenient treatment does not feel like uncomplicated relief. She experiences it as a new pressure to be grateful and accommodating, and as being treated as a token whose privileges make her an example to others of her background.

These different outcomes make the rift between the women seem increasingly social as well as intimate. Their trials and sentences concern acts committed before they met, leaving their time together largely outside the legal record. The legal system does not resolve the consequences of their shared life, and it does not produce an arrest for Mr. Morton’s murder. For Jenny, this mismatch between acts and punishments leaves confusion and pain unaccounted for. It also means that public and legal narratives can revise the women in ways that do not capture the relationship they actually lived.

Jenny’s own trial receives little press attention, but her courtroom is filled with Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese community members who support her father and her case. Their presence and donations, rather than any exceptional merit Jenny believes she possesses, contribute to the judge’s decision to impose the minimum sentence. The support does not restore her confidence in her political choices. Instead, it coexists with her shame at being treated as unusually good and with her recognition that prison has made her feel categorized by race. The account thus places her disillusionment within unequal social treatment, not solely within a private crisis of conscience.

What Remains After Certainty

Jenny’s most lasting loss is not simply her freedom or the years of her twenties, but confidence in the choices she once made. She sees that the world has not healed and that its inequities are not exceptions that can be removed while leaving the rest intact; they are part of how the world operates. With the war no longer providing a sharply identifiable focus for protest, she feels more powerless and cannot see a solution. This disenchantment, she understands, will accompany her beyond prison.

She also has to accept that she is no wiser or less vulnerable to selfish mistakes than Juan or Yvonne. During questioning, she does not betray them, but that loyalty is not a triumph over them. She recognizes it as an acknowledgment that her moral code has failed to make her morally superior. Her disillusionment therefore does not leave her with a purified self or a simple renunciation of the past. It leaves her with a more demanding account of responsibility: good intentions cannot absolve her, luck cannot be mistaken for righteousness, and political conviction does not make her immune to error. She knows her youth is ending, while the problem of how to live and act in a damaged world remains unresolved.