My thoughts about the role of drugs in Clarice and Hannibal's getting together in the Hannibal novel
I recently finished rereading the Hannibal Lecter series, bar Red Dragon, and decided to gather and write my thoughts on the matter.
Would I have preferred it - Clarice getting together with Hannibal - without drugs being involved? Yes, I would. But, I'm afraid, that it was not very realistically possible if we consider Clarice's psychological issues and barriers.
You know what's scary, Ardelia? It's scary when somebody tells you the truth.
It was unlikely that she would visit, examine and admit things and feelings that she had buried deeply in herself without any external intervention lowering her inhibitions and numbing her fear. Take, for example, her anger at her father for dying. She would hardly admit that she was angry at him and blaming him for dying without drugs administered to her:
Clearly Starling loved her father as much as we love anybody, and she would have fought in an instant over a slur on his memory. Yet, in conversation with Dr Lecter, under the influence of a major hypnotic drug and deep hypnosis, this is what she said:
“I’m really mad at him, though. I mean, come on, how come he had to be behind a goddamned drugstore in the middle of the night going up against those two pissants that killed him. He short-shucked that old pump shotgun and they had him. They were nothing and they had him. He didn’t know what he was doing. He never learned anything.”
She would have slapped the face of anybody else saying that. (..) Things she would never have said, things banned from her higher brain.
But her anger was no less true than her love for her father. It wasn't conjured by drugs, it was no less Clarice.
Sometimes she laughed at herself, hearing artless revelations that normally would have mortified her. The things she told Dr Lecter were often surprising to her, sometimes distasteful to a normal sensibility, but what she said was always true.
And Hannibal didn't even try to manipulate her into falling in love with him or convince to stay with him, he didn't even think about it. Their, let's call it, therapeutic conversations were mostly focused on Clarice's psychological hangups related to her father, his death and the slaying lambs and horses incident, on getting over them. In fact, I would argue that Hannibal didn't even know how she felt about him until the dessert scene and her telling him that he doesn't have to give up her because of Mischa. And, by the way, speaking about Mischa, Clarice was not the only one who revealed her secrets, Hannibal told her his own in return.
There is a reason to think that without Hannibal's intervention and resolving her issues with her father and lambs Clarice would have continued to live a life that was lonely and emotionally unfulfilled. She didn't have personal life, and her work didn't bring her satisfaction anymore even before Krendler's machinations with framing her effectually ended her career. After seven years of service Clarice had become disillusioned with the FBI and unhappy:
Starling felt pierced and lonesome in this goat-smelling surveillance van crowded with men. Chaps, Brut, Old Spice, sweat and leather. She felt some fear, and it tasted like a penny under her tongue. A mental image: her father, who smelled of tobacco and strong soap, peeling an orange with his pocketknife, the tip of the blade broken off square, sharing the orange with her in the kitchen. The taillights of her father’s pickup disappearing as he went off on the night-marshal patrol that killed him. His clothes in the closet. His square-dancing shirt. Some nice stuff in her closet now she never got to wear. Sad party clothes on hangers, like toys in the attic.
Starling rode away from her foster home on a slaughter horse while they were killing the lambs, and she found a kind of refuge in the Lutheran Orphanage. Institutional structures, big and solid, made her feel safe ever since. The Lutherans might have been short on warmth and oranges and long on Jesus, but the rules were the rules and if you understood them you were okay.
As long as impersonal competitive testing was the challenge, or doing the job on the street, she knew she could make her place secure. But Starling had no gift for institutional politics.
Now, as she got out of her old Mustang at the beginning of the day, the high facades of Quantico were no more the great brick bosom of her refuge. Through the crazed air over the parking lot, the very entrances looked crooked.
Starling seeking something, anything, walked through the kitchen into the quiet and order of Mapp’s side of the duplex. She looked at the photograph of Mapp’s fierce little grandmother, brewer of the tea. She looked at Grandmother Mapp’s insurance policy framed on the wall. Mapp’s side looked like Mapp lived there.
Starling went back to her side. It looked to her like nobody lived there. What did she have framed? Her diploma from the FBI Academy.
Is it a life anyone would wish for Clarice? I certainly wouldn't. And she would have died at Verger's farm if Hannibal hadn't rescued her. And Hannibal would have died if Clarice hadn't arrived and rescued him. The beauty of this pairing and ending for me is that they saved each other.
Lastly, Thomas Harris makes it clear that she was not under the drugs in the end - The drugs that held her in the first days have had no part in their lives for a long time. If she were with Hannibal because of the drugs, if it were drugs that kept her with Hannibal, she would have left him after Hannibal stopped giving them to her. She was fully capable of doing it, even when under the drugs she was conscious of what she was doing, able to argue her opinions and win Hannibal in the argument, she had her gun, car and car keys. So we can conclude that she stayed with him because she wanted to stay with him.
