lit notes D:
SUFFERING UNDER THE GILEADEAN REGIME
Atwood wishes to convey through The Handmaid’s Tale that current mindsets about women in our society are not as they should be, by extending the repercussions of such mindsets into a dystopian future where women are subjugated under a totalitarian, theocratic state (that is, all public and private behavior is state-regulated, and government is based on religion). In truth, religion is twisted by the state in accordance to its own objectives; it is likely that the theocracy was founded on the principle that the more religious elements of the country would be more easily made to comply when given a faith as basis for the unreasonable laws. But women are not the only ones who suffer, as the totalitarian regime also asserts oppressive control over the men. Nevertheless, the bulk of the suffering lies on the women as they are most degraded, no matter their station, and are subject to the more horrifying aspects of the regime.
Women
Under the Gileadean regime, women are no longer allowed to hold property, arrange their own affairs, make reproductive choices, read, wear make-up, control money, or choose their clothes. They are stripped of any kind of independence or physical freedom, though some, like Offred, do manage to retain spiritual or mental freedom by not letting the bastards run them down, and some even participate in the underground resistance. But even as we see the displays of strength of the human spirit, we also see the weaker souls, the prime example of which is Janine. Sadly, others seem to be willing participants in the oppression of their kind, like the Aunts. The wide spectrum of female characters and their attitudes and roles are clear expressions of Atwood’s literary prowess, and reveal to us the wide range of effects of the Gileadean regime on its people.
There is also what the Gileadean regime plans to achieve, such as control over the mental state of future generations:
“They will accept their duties with willing hearts.
She did not say: Because they have no memories, of any other way.
She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.”
Those who oppose the state, decide not to be Handmaids, or are no longer of use to the state (Handmaids who have failed to procreate after three assignments) are declared Unwomen and shipped off to the Colonies, most of appear to have toxic dumps and radiation spills and lead to almost certain death: “They figure you’ve got three years maximum, at those, before your nose falls off and your skin pulls away like rubber gloves.” Other Colonies involve distasteful manual work involving corpses and potentially cancerous or disease-inducing jobs such as burning corpses. There are purportedly safer Colonies that involve farming, but there is no concrete evidence of this.
Handmaids
The Handmaids are one of the main focal points of The Handmaid’s Tale; they are representative of Atwood’s main point about the degradation of women, as they are reduced to the one functional purpose of reproduction, and treated only as objects of fertility. They are given no real choice in the matter as their one alternative is certain death at the Colonies, and if they fail to reproduce within three assignments they are similarly shipped to the Colonies, even if the Commanders are the ones who are infertile: “it’s heresy. It’s only women who can’t, who remain stubbornly closed, damaged, defective.” On top of this, they are objects of resentment for the Wives and the Econowives, possible disapproval from the Marthas, possible victims of doctors, though most prominently they are victims of state-sanctioned rape and adultery.
Offred
Offred is the main character and it’s tiring to talk about her; furthermore, there have been strong indications that she is not the focus of this test. She is strong-willed but even she is slowly run down by the regime as seen from chapter forty-five:
“Everything they taught at the Red Centre, everything I’ve resisted, comes flooding in. I don’t want pain… I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power.”
“Oh, God. It’s no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?” (p196)
Offred’s source of strength, aside from her strong sense of self and unwillingness to let herself fall into the mental traps that the state induces in its victims, appears to be her use of language; while she is not allowed to read or write, her thoughts often include puns and plays on words, and subtle jibes at people, and she fills the state-enforced mind-numbing emptiness of her life with descriptions and memories and analyses of things, and all these things help to keep her sane.
Moira
Moira is blessed (or cursed) with great strength of character, which seems to be even greater than Offred’s. Offred looks to her somewhat as a role model or hero in courage and strength (“It makes me feel safer, that Moira is here”), and she is also Offred’s close, pre-Gilead, since-college-days friend. Moira is not one to sit and accept things, as Offred does, but is a person of action, and attempts escape despite prior devastating failure:
“They didn’t care what they did to your feet and hands, even if it was permanent. Remember, said Aunt Lydia. For our purposes your feet and hands are not essential.
Her feet did not look like feet at all. They looked like drowned feet, swollen and boneless, except for the colour. They looked like lungs.”
“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom… Nevertheless Moira was our fantasy… In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd.”
But even Moira is made subject, in a way; she lost some fervor for life, lost her compulsion to escape. She ends up in Jezebel’s, and appears to find some sort of contentment there, because there are less restrictions - some degree of freedom.
“I’d rather not talk about it. All I can say is they didn’t leave any marks.”
“She is frightening me now, because what I hear in her voice is indifference, a lack of volition. Have they really done it to her then, taken away something - what? - that used to be central to her? But how can I expect her to go on, with my idea of courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not? …This is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat.”
Janine
Janine is, simply put, weak, both mentally and spiritually. Because of this she is an easy target, for the Aunts to use as an example and to induce the others into mental regression. This has unintended but perhaps not quite unexpected effects - Janine also regresses mentally; she loses whatever mental strength she had, and begins to show signs of going mad.
“Get back here, she said. Get right back here! You can’t stay there, you aren’t there any more. That’s all gone… They won’t mess around trying to cure you. They won’t even bother to ship you to the Colonies.
You can’t let her go slipping over the edge. That stuff is catching.”
Of all the characters she has the worst experience of the Gileadean regime; she was broken, left unable to fight against the system, bereft.
“But by that time Janine was like a puppy that’s been kicked too often, by too many people, at random: she’d roll over for anyone, she’d tell anything, just for a moment of approbation.”
Janine is also used as an example of how, even if the goal of having a child is met, the Handmaids actually receive nothing from it apart from what they are already due as humans: “But she’ll never be sent to the Colonies, she’ll never be declared Unwoman. That is her reward.” Having a child would have been a joyful thing in pre-Gilead (Anarchy) times; we know this from Offred’s recount: “Our happiness is part memory.” But in Gilead, the children are not the Handmaids’, even if they are born of them; they are the Wives’. The Handmaid’s part is only the mechanical part - the birthing, and the breastfeeding, and the pain - they take no part in the joys of raising the child. Even to hold the child after the birthing is denied them. “She’ll be allowed to nurse the baby, for a few months, they believe in mother’s milk. After that she’ll be transferred, to see if she can do it again, with someone who needs a turn.” The cold, hard truth is never more indisputable in chapter twenty-one: the Handmaids have purely functional roles; in the eyes of the state, they are only tools.
Of course, in our society we do sometimes feel as if the government treats us as a statistic, a computer simulation, but at least they pretend we are real enough that we get actual real-time benefits out of their plans. The Handmaids are, to put it crudely, milked for all they’re worth and discarded if they’re not worth.
Wives
Our most prominent impression of Wives would probably be their unfair, cold treatment of the Handmaids, but it is easy to understand and empathise with their behaviour - they are infertile women in a society that upholds the sacredness of fertility; they are “fallen women”, invalid, in a sense, even though they have one of the highest positions in Gilead among the women. (Of course, not all Wives are infertile, but all the ones we read of in the novel are, and it is safe to assume that infertility among Wives is neither uncommon nor a phenomenon. Poor sods.) The Handmaids, therefore, are an affront to them; they are able where the Wives are unable, a physical representation of the Wives’ inadequacy.
Almost in spite of their unfortunate positions, Wives are made to suffer the indignity of the Ceremony, an intense reminder of their inadequacy, and also an emotionally painful experience for them as they have to personally watch their husbands copulating with someone else - while the third party is between their knees. This is pretty damn traumatizing, if you ask me.
Serena Joy
Serena Joy is a particularly potent representation of the Wives as she was involved in the creation of Gilead as well; she was a televangelist in pre-Gilead times, arguing for women to stay at home. “She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”
Like many other Wives she too resents the Handmaids (“She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can’t avoid it. I am a reproach to her; and a necessity.”), and at the same time holds high hopes for them because she wants a child.
“She’d like me pregnant though, over and done with and out of the way, no more humiliating sweaty tangles... I can’t imagine she’d want such good luck, for me, for any other reason.”
Also, she is fiercely protective of the sanctity of her marriage to the Commander:
“As for my husband, she said, he’s just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It’s final. It’s one of the things we fought for.”
Jezebel girls
Despite Aunt Lydia’s claims that women are “getting freedom from”, women are still not entirely free from being viewed as sexual objects. Besides Offred’s encounter with the sexual predator doctor, there is also the illicit but state-sanctioned brothel, Jezebel’s, which the Commander took her to in secret. Evidently women are still subject to degradation to sexual objects (“but they review my breasts, my legs, as if there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.”); it is questionable if the state is serious about “freedom from”, because the Commander, representative of the state, says rather flippantly that “everyone’s human, after all.” Everyone appears to refer only to the elite who are permitted access to this place, though we know that these desires are not limited to them.
Men
“There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for. We have the stats from that time. You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage.”
It appears that the Gileadean society was created for the men, as well as the more obvious reason that replacement rates were too low. Presumably forcing the men into one hierarchal system - becoming Guardians, then Angels, and rising higher up the ranks until finally they are allotted a wife and allowed Handmaids, would allow them to “feel” more - it would rank and women in the position of something “to fight for”, making the men more motivated, giving them something to direct their energies to.
It seems, however, that the restrictions of the system might possibly work against this goal - the men are also repressed, and the long period of time it seems to take to rise in the ranks might breed discontent instead. It is not certain how much basis this argument has as, apart from what the Commander says about it, there seems to be little evidence supporting it, possibly because of the limitations of Offred’s point of view.
While women are subject to the same thing, there is strong emphasis on the men’s Salvagings throughout the book in the form of Offred’s visits to the Wall. Men are executed without fair trial, ostensibly for committing certain inexcusable crimes, such as performing abortions in Anarchy times or for having homosexual relationships (referred to as Gender Treachery), and are hung on the wall “as examples”, though they’re probably actually intended to instill fear. “What we are supposed to feel towards these bodies is hatred and scorn. What I feel towards them is blankness.”
Commanders
Commander Fred
The Commander is one of the few men who play a prominent role in the novel, and the importance of his role stems from his rank. He appears to be one of the founding members of Gilead, an impression which is later further reinforced by the Historical Notes. Yet the Commander is seen as an almost pitiable man, pathetic in what he wants from and in his attitude towards Offred.
“Sometimes he becomes querulous, at other times philosophical…”
“He’s down to his shirt; then, under it, sadly, a little belly.
Without his uniform he looks smaller, older, like something being dried.”
Apart from this we are also given a glimpse of the irrationality and cruelty necessary to create such an abominable state, in chapter thirty-two.
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.
Better isn’t always better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” is a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte’s justification of his carnage, which in turn links the Commander (and Gilead) to Napoleon, indicating the Commander’s ruthlessness.
Guardians
Offred’s description of the roadblock Guardians gives us an indication of how the men, in general, are suppressed. She depicts them, perhaps superficially, as sexually repressed - which they probably are - but there is more to it under that surface. They, too, face unfair restriction; they too are watched. The limitations placed on women are also placed on men, though men are perhaps less secluded, in a way, and not subject to the same degradation.
“If they think of a kiss, they must then immediately of the floodlights going on, the rifle shots. They think instead of doing their duty… They have no outlets now except themselves, and that’s a sacrilege.”
Others
There is no political freedom in Gilead, or tolerance for resistance of any kind. Political opposition member becomes Particicution victim: “Don’t be stupid. He wasn’t a rapist at all, he was a political.”