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It was late at night, maybe nine or ten o’clock, and I was sitting at my desk. I was a good student, doing my reading when chapter 16 came along. I remembered Ms. Giknis telling us that there were disturbing moments in the book, but I figured she just had to say that because there were small moments that could make people minorly uncomfortable. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The chapter starts off with an announcement of a ceremony “The Ceremony goes as usual.” and I didn’t think anything of it. I began to read further and it started to describe the scene of where everything was about to go down. I was confused, not really sure what to expect. Offred and Serena Joy were getting in position for something. I closed my eyes. I realized where I had gotten in the book, and though I like to consider myself mentally tough, reading about nonconsensual sex was a first, and hopefully the last. As they began to describe further details, I began feeling anxious. For some reason, it felt like the book had come to life and I was reading a description of someone I knew, someone real. I took a sip of water, and stared blankly at the book. I had always known rape was a real thing, it just had never hit me what it’s really like. I’ve always tried to not worry about that kind of stuff, having a gut feeling that it might change me reading some of this stuff, and it did. I continued reading again, prepared for what I was about to read, when things took another turn. Offred became vastly uncomfortable, as her description of the situation was anything but normal. “Serena Joy grips my hands as if it is she, not I, who’s being fucked — He is preoccupied, like a man humming to himself in the showing without knowing he’s humming” It brought out a different emotion in me, a sense of awkwardness that just made me more uncomfortable. It made me think about the way people treat women as a whole because the way I looked at it, I think the Commander would expect Offred to be uncomfortable because she’s been forced to have sex with him, but I don’t think he’d expect her to feel awkward. During the ceremony, Offred begins to question herself and the situation. “If he were better looking would I enjoy this more?” My discomfort was slowly dissipating, but I definitely still felt like I went through something, even though all I did was read a few pages. As it finishes, the discomfort spikes, but then it goes back to this grey area. He did what he did, and then just cleaned up and walked out. Serena treated Offred like a dog. “Get up and get out.” This didn’t follow procedure, as Offred is supposed to have time after it, but clearly the ceremony affected her. I realized there’s multiple perspectives to the ceremony. Offred, the one who is being forced into a situation all because of her ability to get pregnant, and Serena Joy, who didn’t ask for her position either. She basically has to help her husband cheat on her, creating a baby that isn’t hers but if Offred conceives one, she has to treat the baby like it is hers. The situation they are in is hurting multiple parties, which made it even harder to read the end of the chapter. I learned that even though any situation I’m in will never be like this, that there are multiple parties involved in things that may not seem they hurt many. I also learned that, though reading this chapter was difficult, I need to read things like it a lot more. It gave me a lot of insight as to what the reality is of terrible scenarios and I know people say “The truth can hurt”, but I think it will only make me more knowledgable.

The Handmaid’s Tale has a new form of hierarchy. A new system. In this hierarchy there are men and women separated. And in these smaller categories, there is also hierarchy. Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids, Econwives, and Unwomen. This ranking system is most based on the ability to produce babies and moral values including before the new system was implemented. The way the system goes, it seems very much based on religious values and it’s being pushed on the whole community. We don’t know how far the system spans in the world but it seems like something not too limited. This notion of religious beliefs and such a vastly different government being forced upon citizens just doesn’t sit right. Another thing that was noted was that for each class of woman, there were different dress colors. Blue for wives (like representing the virgin mary and innocence), Aunts would wear light brown dresses, Martha’s wear green, Handmaids wear red, econwives wear green and blue striped dresses. This is similar to uniforms for school, and as a student I would hate a uniform. Uniforms are to make everyone less individual and uniform. Personally I don’t agree with this because I think self expression through clothing is really important and something I value a lot. I also like to see other people use it as an expression as well. When you think about their strategies to keep order in their system in order, you think of the wall. Or that’s what I thought of. It’s a tactic they use to scare people into submission. That seems to be a theme. Scaring people into submission to their roles. It’s very toxic and I kind of wonder how sustainable it is. How long it will last. The obsession with the wall is representative of values that the higher ups deem wrong. And the consequences that come with not following the ideas of the more powerful. It’s a very strict society where emotions are devalued and therefore people also become dehumanized as emotions are a huge part of humanity. The hierarchy seems to also value “purity” in the eyes of god. For example Serena Joy became a wife because she proved in her old life before the new regime, that she was pure and hadn’t sinned. This bringing in of religion is not new to the world. Like when christianity was being pushed upon people in the past, a similar thing is happening in this book. Also, in the Handmaid’s Tale, there are soul scrolls and lots of mention of prayer. The mention of these are interesting to me because it’s very private, while usually people are scared because they feel constantly watched and spied on. The uncomfort level for women has increased. The Hierarchy of Giead also reveals that the structure of it itself puts women against each other and creates a very quiet, but very judgemental society. Increase in gossip as well because of the lack of communication lines. This environment is women versus women is the most toxic way. Meaning that women are being re taught to hate on other women and criticize them and in turn themselves. They are put down a lot. Our protagonist even seems to have some internalized misogyny instilled in her. Perhaps she was a little like this before gilead, but I think it has definitely increased the more time she spends in gilead. But because she is so much less powerful than many other ranks, she is more easily manipulated. She is put in a position where she feels unsafe to others, and where she is “less than”. Like when the commander takes her to Jezabels, she literally can’t say no. She was put into a position where she could not say no to protect her own life. I don’t think there should be any way she should have been put into a situation she can’t say no in.

In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, there are numerous historical connections and parallels to the past. There is a saying, “History repeats itself” and Atwood believes that is what will happen in a post-apocalyptic world. In the book, there are references to the bible, like on page sixty-one. “Give me children, or else I die.” This is part of the verse Genesis 30:1. “And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.” The idea of what the commander is doing, keeping women held hostage and forcing them to have sex with him to reproduce, comes indirectly from the bible. Throughout history, women have been forced to abide by a number of rules: Not having marital property rights, not being allowed to vote, and not being able to earn an equal wage. Those were a few more notable ones among the long list of rules women had to follow. Women historically were forced into nurturing roles, like teaching and child care, most of all, solely committed to being a wife and mother. This connects to the main theme of The Handmaid’s Tale, as in a parallel to a world reset, the first actions of life in this new world are similar compared to when this world was first established. Women historically have never had a voice. This is shown in THT through their living situation and the stories that Offred tells. They’re always being watched in Gilead, the same way they were in real life. If women were to step out of line, they would be punished. THT also has a lot of polar opposites to the bible. Proverbs 31:30-31 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates. This reference to the bible is one of many instances where women are praised, whereas, in Gilead, women are punished for having the ability to reproduce. In the bible, it does say women should reproduce, but based on the scripture Proverbs 31:20-31, it should be done in a nurturing and loving way. The tale also carries a sense of indoctrination. The book paints a picture of religious extremism, like the ceremony, quoting of the bible, and the imbalance of rights based on gender and fertility. Gilead uses a lot of terminology straight out of the bible. The rituals, as in the living arrangements for handmaids and the ceremony strip the individuality away from the handmaids. They all become the same, as they serve the same purpose. Offred believes she became more than that to the Commander, but then she finds out that he has done what he’s done for her for other girls. The pattern of ‘every handmaid is the same’ repeats itself. It seems to be the driver for the controlling aspect of the handmaids. By forcing them into these religious practices, it forces them to all be in line and abide by rules, but it also makes the people in charge abide by rules. They have to follow traditions even though they are the ones who came up with it, which is why it is recurring. THT also has a lot of similarities to the Holocaust. The women held captive for these practices fit a specific theme, they can all get pregnant, which is exactly what the holocaust did, the only difference was they killed the Jewish people, whereas in Gilead they are giving birth to new lives. The Handmaid’s Tale makes a lot of connections to history, particularly religious practices. They let the bible decide how they treated the women, but in many instances chose to come up with their own rules.

Playlist: hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have- but I have it by Lana Del Rey Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve by Taylor Swift Asking For It by Hole O Children by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Femme Fatale by The Velvet Underground, Nico

hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have- but I have it by Lana Del Rey I connected this song to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood because the song talks about the desperation a woman has for hope in her life, even knowing that it’s not a logical thing to have in her life. “Smiling for miles in pink dresses and high heels on white yachts,” from Lana Del Ray’s song reminded me of when the Japanese tourists visited Gilead, and the way she felt about how they were dressed. Offred talks about how she remembered what it was like to not have to worry about how she was dressed, and envied the female tourists for their freedom to dress however they wished. We also see a part of her that was consumed by the ideals of Gilead, and how she judged those women for the recklessness in their apparel. As she and Ofglen see the tourist they are “Fascinated, but also repelled.” (28) Gilead’s ideals come into play as she now sees them as “Underdressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds about things like this.” (28)

Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve by Taylor Swift I connected this song to The Handmaid’s Tale because this song is about a past relationship that is highly regretted, calling him a “ghost” from her past. Offred often refers to her daughter as a ghost as a way to cope with the fact that she is no longer with her. She describes the way she thinks about her daughter as “this contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. (106)” This quote reminds me of the lyrics “All I used to do was pray, Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve. If you’d never looked my way, I would’ve stayed on my knees, and I damn sure never would’ve danced with the devil.” This scene and these lyrics are comparable because it shows Offred’s way of believing her daughter was either safe or dead, and how she wishes she could’ve protected her.

Asking For It by Hole I connected this song to The Handmaid’s Tale because this song is about society’s norm of always placing the blame on women whenever they are the victim of something. There is quite a clear side by side similarity between this song and the book, the song’s chorus being “Was she asking for it? Was she asking nice? If she was asking for it, did she ask you twice?”, and in chapter 13 when Janine is testifying in the Red Center about how she was gang raped at fourteen and the Aunts made all the girls chant at her “Her fault. Her fault. Her fault.”(72) These lyrics and this scene in the book are comparable because they show how society is very quick to judge a woman for what she could have done to “deserve” her assault, and the deep rooted misogyny in these beliefs.

O Children by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds I connected this song to The Handmaid’s Tale because it reminded me of Offred’s description of the beginning of Gilead, and how she tried to leave the country with her family. The lyrics, “They are knocking now upon your door. They measure the room, they know the score.”, reminds me of the security checkpoints Gilead had in place at the borders of the country. The lyrics “We’re all weeping now, weeping because, there ain’t nothing we can do to protect you,” reminds of the scene in chapter 12 where Offred is having flashbacks of her daughter, and later describes how she sees her. “She fades. I can’t keep her here with me, she’s gone now. Maybe I do think of her as a ghost, the ghost of a dead girl, a little girl who died when she was five.”(64) These lyrics and this scene are comparable because it shows how Offred likes to think of her daughter as dead to help her cope with the fact that she doesn’t know where she is and she is unable to protect her.

Femme Fatale by The Velvet Underground, Nico I connected this song to The Handmaid’s Tale because this song is about the stereotype society has created for a “seductive woman” that will use her sexuality to “torment” men. The lyrics “It’s not hard to realize, just look into her false colored eyes. She builds you up to just put you down, what a clown.” reminded me of the scene in chapter 10 where Offed is recalling the way Aunt Lydia talked about the way women dressed during the summer. She describes them as “spectacles.” She says, “Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder these things used to happen.” These lyrics and this scene are comparable because it shows how society viewed women as objects, and everything they did was in effort to get attention or to gain sexual attraction from others.

In Gilead colors play a huge role in society. We see this in our own society too, and in every society throughout time. Blue for boys and pink for girls, red for stop and green for go, the association of red with communism, white with purity and innocence, mourners wearing black. However sometimes colors represent very different things in different cultures or parts of the world, for example, most Western cultures associate black with death and white with life, but in some Asian cultures white is actually associated with death and mourning. No matter what they represent though, colors are undeniably a universally easy way of identifying things one way or another, and have been used so all throughout history. As Atwood says in the introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale, “Many totalitarianisms have used clothing, both forbidden and enforced, to identify and control people- think of yellow stars and Roman purple- and many have ruled behind a religious front, it makes the creation of heretics that much easier.” Here she is referring to the yellow stars that Jewish people were made to wear by the Nazis during the Holocaust in some European countries, both inside and outside of ghettos and concentration camps so as to be easily identified, and the color purple signifying high status in ancient Rome since it was so hard and expensive to make the purple dye.

The colors each person can wear is entirely dependent on their station in Gileadean society, and makes each person easily identifiable. The assigned colors are just another contributing factor to the absolute control and lack of individuality in Gilead. We get a sense of this very early on in the book as Offred explains every detail of her suffocating red outfit that she must wear, and how even the umbrellas have specific colors, “black, for the commander, blue, for the commander’s wife, and the one assigned to me, which is red.” This control of everything by the government is part of the erasure of individuality in Gilead, which is the goal of the government because it makes the people easier to control.

These colors don’t only have significance in Gilead though. In the introduction of The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood explains her inspiration behind some of the themes of the book, including the assigned colors. “The modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography- the wives wear the blue of purity, from the virgin Mary, the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of parturition, but also from Mary magdalene.” The color coding of people in Gilead is just another reinforcement of the totalitarianism of the regime for the people of Gilead. It reminds them every moment of their day that they are not defined by who they are as people, but rather as what their station is. It is also a psychological manipulation tool. It has been proven that certain colors make you feel a certain way, and also it ensures that everyone is associated with their color and station, and not with who they actually are.

There is also the practical element of color coding all the people in Gilead. As Atwood says in the introduction, “red is easier to see if you happen to be fleeing.” This is mentioned several times throughout the book, with Offred thinking about how she sticks out like a sore thumb in her bright red, which would make it much more difficult for her to run away and not be seen. The color of the outfit is not the only element of control though, the heaviness and lack of form is obviously meant to hide the Handmaids bodies to prevent any temptation. And the big white headpieces with blinders are a clever way to isolate the Handmaids even more, preventing their faces from being seen and them from seeing other Handmaids faces, and also preventing them from making eye contact, which is a very big part of human connection. It is reminiscent of some forms of religion that use similar things to oppress women, labeling them as temptations and therefore making them hide their bodies and dress very modestly. There are of course women who are not forced to do this and actually find liberation and power in dressing modestly, but when something is forced upon you it is usually not empowering.

The first thing I want to talk about is how in The Handmaid’s Tale they aren’t allowed to look at magazines because they are outlawed. The whole idea of them being outlawed is because it will think of individuality and in Gilead which is a sin because the women are only supposed to think about bearing children. It also tells how women should dress, in the book it describes the colors of what the girls wear, and they all have no individuality for them to stand out from the rest. Sexuility has a lot to do with it too because in some magazines it shows nudity and skin and the point of being a “woman” is being modest for men so you can find a good husband because that’s what men like. One quote I found interesting was,“Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fish bait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I’d taken such magazines lightly enough once. I’d read them in dentists’ offices, and sometimes on planes; I’d bought them to take to hotel rooms, a device to fill in empty time while I was waiting for Luke. After I’d leafed through them I would throw them away, for they were infinitely discardable, and a day or two later I wouldn’t be able to remember what had been in them. Though I remembered now.” It reminded me of how women would have been inspiring the world with their creativity and showing their difference in the world.

Shopping was a big part of Gilead. The handmaid’s would grocery shop mostly everyday for their households, and it was a part of their “culture” since they did it a lot. This relates to the shopping bags because it shows what is acceptable for what women should do, and how a woman should accomplish her everyday duties. How women are viewed in the society like all women are good for is to bring home food and shop in piers to “safety” What roles a woman should play in being a handmaid.

The difference between modesty and immodesty is one tells more about what kind of girl you are. Modesty plays a big factor in in this book because the men believe that the women get raped or SA because of the clothes they wear. It also has to do with the bible, in the bible the women shouldn’t be showing no skin because it gives a man right to stare at her sexually and you would be a whore if you didn’t cover up. “Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led them on? She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.” Men try to explain this by covering up and we as women wouldn’t be seen as sexual beings.

As someone who struggles with both mental health and memory loss, Offred has been very relatable to me as a character. In Margret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, The main character Offred is suffering as a handmaid in this new dystopian society following the collapse of the government in America. She’s forced to be a womb and a maid. Forced to lose her past life and ultimately lose herself. It becomes very easy for her to lose herself more and more as the story progresses. The more she remembers, the more trauma is revealed in the past and she then stops herself in the midst of the memories to remind herself why she forgot those memories. My past as a human being has not been as bad as Offred’s but it wasn’t all too normal either. Being in the situations I was at the age I was caused me to lose myself and put on a persona of compliance. This caused me to lose myself in the end which also contributed to my loss in memory. I don’t want to recall when in the past I’ve been hurt so I cut those memories out to make the suffering less of a pain.

On page 30 of the book, the reader is hit with a strong poetic line that uncovers a lot about Ofrred’s character and her thinking pattern. This could lead the reader to wonder about how reliable the past Offred explains is true later in the story. “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” Atwood seems to have portrayed Offred as this person who has a mindset of reconstructing* memories in order to fit her image of who this person she should be. It sounds like a survival instinct to blend in, in almost every way, so that you won’t die. Blending in so much that you become who you’re pretending to be. For as long as I can remember, I knew I wasn’t the gender I was assigned at birth, and it bothered me, but the household I grew up in had very negative opinions on transgender people. This led me to hide myself for a very long time, trying to fit in so much so I wouldn’t be suspected of someone who wants to be a different gender and to hide the thought that I would slip up about it. This caused me to lose who I actually was under all the pretending. The additional abuse and built-up negative memories I would have also slipped away. Why think about the bad things if they won’t get fixed? Was a thought I had frequently. I had it so much that I started forgetting my problems completely. There was never any use in thinking about things that couldn’t be helped, which led to the loss of most of my childhood memories.

The society that Offred resides in has a steady plan of internalizing misogyny in women into making them hate themselves, their bodies, and their beauty for “protection”. On page 72 were show an example of how internalized misogyny is practiced in Gilead and how it influences the handmaids into feeling about themselves. This caused them to blame themselves for countless acts of harassment and assault. “But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her Fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who Led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She did.” This section of the story shows the reader how the confessions go in Gilead. Janine is talking about a time she got raped and Aunt Helena responds by creating a growing chant within the crowd of women saying it was her fault and she led him on. In the society we live in today it is hard to be a woman. Being blockaded with standards to meet and men to please because our safety literally bets on how happy a man is. And, in this world, we are blamed for what happens to us in assault and harassment. If anything happens related to that the female is seen as getting what was coming to her because she was revealing. When I first came out as trans in school I was being sexually harassed multiple times by someone I thought of as a friend. When I went to tell a close friend of mine about it they responded with “Well this is what happens when you want to be a girl, you asked for it”. I immediately began hating who I was. I wasn’t allowed to feel comfortable in my skin. If I got hurt it was my fault. This is why I relate to Offred as a character and enjoy Atwood’s writing on this character in the story “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

This piece of art I have created represents the scene where Offred and the Commander are playing Scrabble in the commander’s office. I thought drawing this scene would be significant due to the meaning behind the act that is occurring between Offred and the Commander. In Gilead, reading and writing are forbidden territory for a woman. Offred is able to play Scrabble due to the Commander inviting Offred to play Scrabble with him. This of course is against the rules. Which is why this is the main scene where questions start rising because we as readers, aren’t sure why the commander is bending the rules, especially bending the rules for a handmaid. While reading chapter 23 and going into depth while reading, I tried picturing the scene between Offred and the commander playing Scrabble. Each time I pictured it, the artwork that I had created showed what I imagined. I pictured the commander’s office as an elegant room with a fireplace and antique candles. Due to the era of the book and the status the Commander holds. As well as Offred and the Commander playing Scrabble. A quote that resonated with the scene, where Offred and the Commander are alone is; “So why does he want to see me, at night, alone? If I´m caught, it´s to Serena´s tender mercies I´ll be delivered. He isn´t supposed to meddle in such household discipline, that´s women´s business. After that, reclassification. I could become an un-women. But to refuse to see him, could be worse. There´s no doubt about who holds the real power ̈. This quote was found on page 136 and it expresses and shows how Offred had no choice but to accept the Commander’s invitation to play Scrabble. In Gilead, there is no way out. You either follow the rules or you don´t which can end up badly for one. Offred understands who has power and what territory belongs to one. Offred understands that Serena is in control of what goes on and should be going on within her home. But the power the Commander holds is anything that is not part of the house or the needs of the house. That is why Offred is afraid to get caught. She does not want to be sent to the colonies because she knows she´ll suffer if she is sent and forced there. The relationship between Offred and the Commander is quite interesting. The type of relationship they have is not only physical tension but the need to learn as clearly shown with Offred and the commander playing Scrabble. Offred knows that even though Serena holds power in the house she knows that she cannot deny the commander. As a reader, I start questioning; who has the power? Is it mutual or does the man continue to hold power due to how Gilead is shaped? If Offred was ever to be caught by Serena, could the commander have a say in whether Offred is either sent to the colonies or remains owned by the commander? This would stir up situations depending on who´s word counts and who´s doesn´t.

My visual representation portrays the mass amount of symbolism in my school in the form of one big symbol. The water below and the cross-like hanging position represent the place Gilead is in while Offred is telling the story. In the show, it shows they’re in the same place where Obama made his speech. The eye above represents the influence the Eyes have on Gilead as a whole, they cause them war as well as paranoia within Gilead that their own peers may be spies from the eyes. Some say the eyes work with Gilead. The cross-like hanging position also represents the Religious influence on the world of Gilead. As we go within the story we are shown multiple times how religion is the cause of this country. The Handmaid wrapped in all the chains signifies the amount of control men have over them and even though this society was built to “Protect “ women, it does not give them basic human rights. Similar to just keeping someone in a box, as Offred said on page 165 “ A rat in a maze is free as long as it stays in the maze.” This was a reference to how she wasn’t able to travel outside of the walls and that she could go anywhere as long as she stayed within the border. She is also taught forced misogyny which we find out at the confession ceremonies in chapter 13 page 72. They are told to express the times they have been assaulted and then blame it on them. “ But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison, Who led them on, Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She DId. “ Atwood expresses the mass self-misogyny in the society we live in today and how that is the reason most women are brainwashed to love this life of just doing the cooking, cleaning, and bearing just like in this book, they use religion to justify their protection. They’re only used for breeding and caretaking and that’s exactly how the world is. The signs behind the handmaid represent the things Gilead actually stands for. Connecting to the freedom to and freedom from, the freedom they have in Gilead is from the hostility and abuse of men but that takes away their freedom to dress the way they want, act the way they want, and do the things they want. Even in this society of Gilead, we can see that the men have not been fully restricted for their abuse, mainly sexual abuse. There are still loopholes men go into such as the doctors who decide to touch women and use their infertility as an excuse to have sex with them. As well as the commander and his emotional connections with the handmaids and stealing and giving them things just for his pleasure and amusement since he’s lonely. The women don’t really have the freedom to or from anything at all.

Reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood has been an awakening journey. Page 162, in particular, left an indelible mark on my thoughts, perception, and emotional understanding of what it means to be a woman in a society that seeks to stifle our very essence. It begins with Offred’s contemplation, “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.” Immediately, I was struck by the depth of this revelation. As a high school student in a world that is constantly evolving, I have often felt the pressure to conform to societal norms and standards. There’s a general mold that women are often expected to fit into, a model that dictates our behavior, aspirations, and dreams. Moreover, while today’s society seems more liberating than Gilead, there are moments when I feel like I am being ushered into those ‘blank white spaces,’ pushed to the periphery, as if my story is less significant than the mainstream tales. Like Offred, I have felt that living in the gaps provides freedom, a space unbound by rules and expectations. However, unlike Offred, I haven’t been forced into those gaps; I’ve willingly sought them out in search of individuality. The emotional gravity of Offred’s words made me reflect upon the countless stories of women throughout history, relegated to the shadows, their tales unwritten or undervalued. It also made me think of my own experiences. There have been times in classes where I’ve felt my opinions, especially as a young woman, were overshadowed by louder, often male, voices. And while Gilead is an exaggerated dystopia, the underlying themes of suppression, subjugation, and silence are realities many women face to varying degrees. Margaret Atwood’s prose is hauntingly beautiful. The subtlety with which she addresses harrowing themes is unnerving. As Offred recalls her mother’s generation’s efforts to burn pornographic magazines, she reflects on the paradox of freedom: “Freedom, like everything else, is relative.” It made me wonder: Do we truly understand the nature of freedom? Are we ever truly free, or is freedom just a spectrum where we find ourselves at varying degrees? I’ve grown up believing I live in a free society, but Offred’s musings made me question my beliefs. Maybe freedom is the ability to question, to challenge, and to dream. Or maybe it’s the space between chains, the moments of respite before the next shackling. Connecting this page to earlier parts of the novel, Offred’s reminisces about the time before Gilead took over. The women of the past fought for rights, and their battles seem distant to her earlier life of assumed freedom. As a teenager in today’s world, it’s easy to forget the struggles of women who came before us. The right to vote, the right to work, the right to an education – rights that I take for granted were once a distant dream for many women. The novel serves as a stark reminder that freedoms can be fleeting and must be safeguarded. Offred’s yearning for a simpler past resonated with me, especially in these trying times. It’s easy to become nostalgic, longing for days when our biggest worries were trivial. For Offred, her trivial days were when she had the liberty to love, dream, and live. For me, it’s the pre-pandemic world, where school hallways echoed with laughter and weekends were for outings. But both of us, separated by fictional timelines and very real circumstances, yearn for a sense of normalcy, a return to days of unburdened freedom. What made this section even more intriguing was the fusion of Offred’s resignation with moments of rebellion. This duality is reminiscent of every teenager’s journey, including mine. We oscillate between conformity and rebellion, seeking to find our identity amidst societal expectations. Page 162 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a poignant reminder of the fragility of freedom and the importance of remembering our history. It made me cherish the liberties I have while also prompting me to challenge and question the status quo. Offred’s reflections, though set in a dystopian world, mirror the trials and tribulations of women across ages, including a high school student like me.

The Colors of Gilead

The colors the women and men wear in The Handmaid’s Tale deliberately reveal their role in Gilead through a biblical lens. The typical battle between Red vs. Blue or Hot vs. Cold is portrayed through the Handmaids and the Wives. Red in the Bible is typically talked about in terms of blood. Or in this case, a woman’s menstrual cycle. This reveals to the Gilead society that the handmaid is a fertile woman who has been assigned the role of giving birth. Accompanied by the color white, the Handmaids wore a white-winged hat, representing Jesus Christ, innocence, and sacrifice. The Handmaids are forced into sacrificing their minds, knowledge, and identities to an abusive society.

In the Bible, the color blue is often referred to as pure blue, or the Virgin Mary, which can describe the irony of the Wive’s inability to get pregnant. Also, the book has never described the wives as being penetrated reinforcing their role as what is considered pure. In the first mention of the two colors (pg.9) Offred is describing the color umbrellas assigned to her, red, the commander, black, and the Commander’s wife, blue. It is later mentioned (pg.12) where Offred discusses the garden and the Wive’s relationship with caring for and maintaining it. In this quote, Margaret Atwood uses color to create an innuendo where Offred describes herself and her circumstances and other handmaids and the power the Wives hold over them. Their mental and physical freedom has been taken from them and they now have to adjust themselves to a new way of life. “The tulips are red, a darker crimson toward the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there.”

In Gilead, color plays a role in one’s new identity in this society. This is similar to American society where only a piece of your identity defines how you are treated by an overwhelming majority of people in the country. The color of your skin as well as your gender is immediately confined to what history has shaped every race and gender to be. This causes the identity of each individual to be lost in an endless swarm of stereotypes.

This has been done through laws and systems that create loopholes in many to prevent people at the bottom of the American hierarchy from an adequate and humane lifestyle. Roe V Wade., the law protecting a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body in terms of abortion in every state was overturned last June in 2022. Now in more than nearly half the states abortions are either completely banned or banned after 6-18 weeks of pregnancy. One can assume Christian ideologies play a role in this recent decision of the Supreme Court. Many who are in support of the abortion ban argue against basic human rights with their Christian interpretation of what they think the reproduction process should look like. Often blaming only women for the result of an act, sometimes forced, between two people where only she will suffer the consequence. While simultaneously shaming women for having children out of wedlock enforcing this idea that women should only have sex if they’re married. However, Gilead contradicts this idea by making the Wives infertile.

We see a similar tactic of oppression used in Gilead when Janine gives her testimony of being gang-raped at the age of 14. The Handmaids begin chanting that it is Janine’s fault for being raped because she ‘led them on’ Atwood uses this scene to highlight the stupidity of this reasoning that we still hear typically from the conservative viewpoint in a way that is almost comical. The colors of American society have for generations, since the beginning of what America is now, installed oppression on all races except the white race. Without this unjust system, the current people in power would not hold that power. At least not here. Slavery of the African American race, similar to Gilead, was implemented through physical and mental abuse. One of the tactics was also weaponizing Christianity, forcing the Africans to believe that if they did not obey and sacrifice their lives to better theirs, there would be far worse consequences from a higher power.

In America, we see similar loopholes that we see in Gilead preventing people at the bottom of the hierarchy from reaching the top—for example, voter restriction laws. When black men were given the right to vote in 1870 southern states created loopholes that would disproportionately remove black voters. Loopholes like literacy tests understanding that African Americans were for centuries prohibited from reading and poll taxes knowing that African Americans were starting to make a living for themselves, automatically making them poor. Atwood uses multiple parts of history to demonstrate the cruel and dehumanizing way societies are run. She highlights the universal issue of gender inequality in her writing in a thoughtful way that the reader can not breeze through, like many do with the current media, but has to sit and digest. B

Songs: Matte Kudasai (1981) - King Crimson

https://youtu.be/eoAupjcnm1c?si=Mwg_hYjNdxg7JuoZ

I Talk to the Wind (1969) - King Crimson

https://youtu.be/UlKrH07au6E?si=gPDgsOOtm7T49GSa

Epitaph (1969) - King Crimson

https://youtu.be/vXrpFxHfppI?si=_hfIQnPxiOXcb7-O

Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed (1998) - Shiro Sagisu & Arianne

https://youtu.be/gfbTvv076dQ?si=nyUJ3DqVYX65MGFO

TalkTalk (2018) - A Perfect Circle

https://youtu.be/-aOyAvbj2Fg?si=4Ol5lO7QFN3bUCAs

Connections:

Matte Kudasai (1981): Matte Kudasai, from the 1981 King Crimson album Discipline, is a song about memory, loss, and a longing for something unattainable. The title of the song comes from a Japanese phrase roughly translating to “Wait, please.” These feelings of memories, loss, nostalgia, and the such are ever prevalent throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, especially in the Night chapters. But there is one scene where I think that the ideas of the song are more pertinent then in most other scenes. “I lie in bed, still trembling. You can wet the rim of a glass and you run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.” This is the first line in chapter 18 of The Handmaid’s Tale. For the rest of the chapter Offred talks about her need for love, specifically that of Luke. She wants him here with her, and without his love or any love in general she feels empty, like a husk. This is exemplified in lines such as, “It’s lack of love we die from.”, “I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does,”, or “It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive.” Offred is so desperate for any form of love that even a more than likely futile hope can keep her going. The second verse of Matte Kudasai fits perfectly with this scene; “When, when was the night so long? Long, like the notes I’m sending. She waits in the air, Matte Kudasai. She sleeps in a chair In her sad America.” As I said earlier this is a song about loss and nostalgia and that specific verse illustrates those themes particularly well. The lyrics themselves also match up fairly well with the text in chapter 18, at least to me, they give off a similar emotion as well as a similar prose. The themes present in the song are themes that are intrinsic and vital to the character of Offred, so the song works as both a theme for this scene but as a leitmotif for Offred as a character.

I Talk to the Wind (1969): Yet another King Crimson Song though this one is from their debut album In the Court of the Crimson King released in 1969. Where Matte Kudasai gives off a much sadder and melancholic tone I Talk to the Wind is much more ethereal and airy. It feels like a trailing thought dancing in the wind, but beneath the calming music and celestial vocal performance there are very somber undertones. It is a song of confusion and disillusion with the idea of God. And the tone and themes of the song fit very well with many moments in The Handmaid’s Tale. In chapter 27 Offred and Ofglen are walking through the city when they pass the Soul Scrolls storefront and after a short conversation Ofglen asks Offred “‘Do you think God listens,’ […] ‘to these machines?’” to which Offred responds “No.” This scene showing both Offreds and Ofglens doubts on whether or not God listens fits perfectly with the chorus of I Talk to the Wind, “I talk to the wind, my words are all carried away. I talk to the wind. The wind does not hear, the wind cannot hear.” Many, including myself, interpret the song as a pious man talking to a non-religious person. And as the pious man talks to the “Late Man” he begins to doubt whether God, the wind, is listening or even can listen. These doubts on whether or not God listens is critical to how Offred views both Gilead and religion in general.

Epitaph (1969): From the same album as I Talk to the Wind, in fact literally the next song on the album, Epitaph is the most rock-like of these three King Crimson songs. Written at the height of the Cold War in the late sixties, it is a song about the end of the world, not by nature nor God, but rather through the deeds of men. This fits well with the fall of the United States and the rise of Gilead, as many of the people who lived through it view it as the end of the world as they knew it. “It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?” This line from page 174 aligns closely with one of the repeating lyrics of Epitaph, “Confusion will be my epitaph” When massive change, especially bad change, happens most people feel only confusion, it’s all one can feel in these situations. I think the most important line in Epitaph and the one that fits most closely with the world under Gilead is near the end of the song, “Will no one lay the laurel wreath when silence drowns the screams?” The laurel wreath is a symbol of victory, given to Roman commanders after a successful war or conquest. But there was no victor in Gilead’s takeover. No one won, say for an extraordinarily small number of people, everyone is either a slave to a master or a slave to the system as a whole. No one is happy; not the Wives, Marthas, Handmaids, or even the Commanders. They are all silenced and repressed

Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed (1998): Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed was an unused song in the animated movie End of Evangelion and is therefore deeply tied to the themes of that movie and the Eva franchise as whole. Those themes being that of escapism, freedom, despair, and most importantly in our case love, or lack thereof. And though it was made with a completely different series in mind, it fits The Handmaid’s Tale shockingly well. In chapter 35 of The Handmaid’s Tale Offred is meeting with the Commander and on her way she ponders love. What love is now and what it was before. “God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. […] We were waiting, always,” In the before times and especially now love is always just out of reach. Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed mirrors these ideas perfectly with the songs chorus, “You can sail the seven seas Love is a place you’ll never see Passing you like a summer breeze You feel life has no other reason to be You can wait a million years and find That heavens too far away from you.” Even as I am writing this I am a little shocked on how well this works, I mean the mention of heaven as a way of showing that love is just out of reach is perfect. This song, like Matte Kudasai, works perfectly as themes for Offred and her character. She is someone who has lost a lot and has been denied almost all forms of connection, platonic or romantic. She, like everyone, is desperate for any kind of bond, but in Gilead, it is all too far out of reach.

TalkTalk (2018): This is the most different song in the playlist, where the others were softer and much longer, TalkTalk is shorter and a lot more aggressive in its tone. TalkTalk also has, in my opinion, the most unique meaning of the five songs listed here, being a commentary on the people who only talk about issues and do nothing about it. Another interpretation, and the one I personally like more, is that it is a song about those who twist words of religion to further means and to say something without really saying anything. The main repeating lyric of TalkTalk is, “Sit and talk like Jesus Try walkin’ like Jesus Sit and talk like Jesus Talk like Jesus Talk, talk, talk, talk” People talk like Jesus, use his words to push their agenda, but they do not act like Jesus, do not do as he said, they don’t walk like Jesus. This relates to The Handmaid’s Tale as Gilead is a theocracy, a government built around one state religion, and this religion is some sect of Christianity. Everything in Gilead is based around Christianity; Marthas are named after the sister of Jesus, the ‘slogan’ for the handmaids (Give me children, or else I die) is a quote from Genesis 30, even the name Gilead is a reference to a fertile land within Jerusalem, hell even the storefronts are references to the Bible. Everything in Gilead is built around this bizarre sect of Christianity, but they just happen to leave out all of the parts that don’t fit their agenda. They spew out the words of a doctrine they don’t even properly follow, they talk like Jesus but do not walk like Jesus.

In Chapter 35 Offred receives a gift from the commander’s wife that she has been waiting for since the day she got assigned to live with Serena Joy and the Commander. Even though she only had a minute with that special gift, at the end it didn’t feel like a gift anymore; it felt like a punishment, like she was pulled even deeper into her new life as a handmaid. Serena Joy gave Offred a polaroid of her daughter. “I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side up. Is this her, is this what she’s like? My Treasure. So tall and changed. Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion. Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she’d brought me nothing.” Knowing that her daughter, her treasure, is healthy, beautiful, alive and hopefully happy made all of those years of Offred’s suffering worth it. Every mother wants their child to be alive and safe, have them with them at all times, be able to see them everyday and give them a hug. A mother loves their child no matter what their relationship is like, no matter what they went though, and no matter where they are. Having the feeling of knowing that you have someone, and they have you but not being able to say it or show it is one of the harder things anyone could go through, especially a mother that has been there for you since the first day you met. Offred seeing her daughter without her mom in that picture made her feel like it’s her fault, feeling like she’s dead to her, and even maybe out of her memories. This made me think of the time in the book where all the handmaids had to go through “Testifying” where they tell their personal stories about being raped, getting abortions, being catcalled, and then being forced to belive that its their fault, and they deserved it. Offred already has that empty feeling inside her, sitting in her room all by herself, or being used by the commander; receiving that polaroid from Serena Joy did not help with that feeling, deep inside it made Offred feel even worse, an even more disappointment than she already believes she is. Is it better to just live in the present? Leave the past behind and hope that the good things from it come back to the future? I feel like seeing her daughter will make her days in the Gilead go by even slower than they already have been. I really believe that it would have been better for Offred to never see that polaroid, but just keep on hoping and dreaming that her daughter is out there somewhere, happy and alive.

I wanted to talk about this specific section of chapter 19. Some of the rest of the chapter was interesting, but this one grasped my attention. What was interesting to me was the comparison of her dreams to her reality. And what she thinks about to try and make amends/ cope with what she is going through. Something that I also thought about was how we as people go through these same motions, to try to avoid or make better of our situation. Whether consciously or subconsciously we create this false reality, that eventually might turn into a delusion because of how much we try to convince ourselves that what we are thinking is true. Just to feel a sense of placement in our reality. If you make assumptions you leave immense room for imagination. That in itself can be detrimental. This mostly applied to my life when I was younger and still does. I was always a young and independent child. I was always put in positions to make myself as such, from riding septa alone at around the age of 6 to driving and having cars since I was 12. I encountered obstacles that many children my age weren’t thinking about. And with this independence came a lot of burden and responsibility. And it took a lot out of me from a young age. But I could never really grasp that because I thought it just came with growing up. But as I did get older I realized that it wasn’t and that I was going through things. Nevertheless, I still couldn’t understand it. And nevertheless, I still dont. It reached a point where it became my “identity” and I was “meant” to go through these struggles to build and shape who I was. “Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion” (pg.109), when I was younger I would’ve never formatted it this way and I still wouldn’t. But I would always say why me? Why can’t and or what can I do to create a better life? It was a constant battle between my mind and the reality that I continued to exist in. I would say to myself that it would get better trying to configure a different outcome of my situation, knowing that I had no control or power. And came up with dreams and aspirations that to a kid were in a metaphoric sense tangible. But in its reality was what it was, just a dream. “Sanity is a valuable possession”. The thing I like most about this quote is the direct connection to the text previous to it. They complement each other in just the correct way. And it makes sense, to be forced into a position that isn’t beneficial to your life and that brings nothing but hardship and tribulations deserves a space of comfort. And sanity is just the comfort that is needed. Without that, you’ll eventually lose yourself or the values in which you live. And you’ll just be a soul without life essentially. I was being complacent in a place that you aren’t content with. Struggling every day to create this persona of the person who you wish to be. This form of “sanity” I can also relate to. Not saying that I am crazy but just to have a word or phrase to describe your comfort has always been a good place to fall back on when you feel as though your reality is falling apart. My form of “sanity” was poetry. I always liked to think I was good with words, but I still somewhat do. So to me, poetry came naturally, mixing it with my emotions just added an extra component. It became my outlet for whatever was going on in my head and the things that I would create inside it. The symbolization of this section is profound in a sense, mostly because of the deep connections it can have to people and the text being in its authentic and original form. The things you can dissect from such a small amount of words or just comparing it to your life is what makes this section so divert. Also, the diversity that this text demonstrates is a prime example of the reflection and comparison of the creative mind and the realization of reality.

The Commander in the Handmaid’s Tale has evolved and has become a bigger character as the story has progressed. When we first got introduced to his character, it seemed like he wouldn’t ever be present in Offred’s life other than the days of the Ceremony and an occasional encounter. He was made to appear unreachable to Offred because he’s at the top of the social hierarchy in Gilead. He then asked Offred to meet him 1-on-1, and it quickly made him seem less powerful and intimidating than he was before. However, this made me question what his motives were. Before their actual meeting, I thought he had harmful intentions, maybe something sexual or some sort of bad news. Instead, he asked Offred to play Scrabble. “I’d like you to play a game of Scrabble with me,” he says. I hold myself absolutely rigid”. From this moment I was convinced that the commander simply missed normal interactions instead of the controlled conversations people have in Gilead. I thought that maybe he missed some sort of romance when he asked Offred to kiss him. We explored various thoughts in class about what his true intentions could’ve been. In the discussion of chapters 21-26, some said the Commander found pleasure in showing off his power to Offred, others said he wanted to give Offred a little bit of power and normalcy. I thought he simply felt lonely and wanted to escape the boundaries and rules of Gilead.

My opinions on the Commander didn’t change until the day he took Offred to the club. All of their meetings before this had seemed harmless, even though they were dangerous for both since they were breaking the rules. Despite this, the Commander’s true intentions weren’t clear. But at this point, I felt like if he had any bad intentions, they would’ve been shown already. All he had done so far with these meetings was give Offred a form of escape from her strict routine and entertainment by letting her read books, and magazines, and play Scrabble.

When the Commander explained what the Latin saying was to Offred, and she found out that the girl from before had also been in this situation with the Commander, I then thought that he had this whole thing planned just so that the handmaids wouldn’t try and find a way out such as killing themselves. “If my life is bearable, maybe what they’re doing is all right after all.”(187). While this seemed like it was completely for the benefit of the Commander, I still found that it was a good thing for the Handmaid’s as well.

It wasn’t until chapters 36 and 37 when the Commander took Offred out to the club that his character took a complete turn and some of his thoughts were revealed. “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy, It’s Nature’s plan.”(237) When I read this I was surprised to see that what seemed to be like a character in Gilead that didn’t believe in the beliefs of Gilead, only didn’t believe them for his own messed up sexist ideas. He showed his admiration for the club and suggested working there as an alternative. “You might even prefer it yourself, to what you’ve got.”(238). What really made an impact on me while reading this was that I believed he thought the complete opposite of this, and he ended up being the embodiment of everything Gilead stood for. Gilead tries to make it seem like this way is better than what they had before. Women are “safer” and more respected but men are the only ones who actually benefit from Gilead. Even after seeing all this, Offred ignored it. “I remind myself that he is not an unkind man; that, under other circumstances, I even like him.” (254). I think the Commander’s role in this book and how he’s perceived by the readers really says a lot about our society. What the Commander believes can be seen a lot in what men in real life believe. As a woman, I feel mad that I didn’t think anything necessarily bad of him until he made it completely clear what his beliefs were. How Offred reacted to this also shows just how much women are susceptible to these things.

“Is there joy in this? There could be, but have they chosen it? You can’t tell by looking.” Thought by Offred in chapter 37 page 235, this topic of thinking is something I think about often. I assume I question other people’s thought processes a lot because of the amount of time I’ve spent with psychiatrists/therapists throughout my life. Thoughts on what causes someone to have feelings about something and someone’s true feelings are common for me to think about. Like Offred, I question the grand unknown of other’s interests and experiences. Is the joy that things grant someone able to truly be understood by others? The way you answer this question depends on how your joys have come to be. There are things that bring joy to multiple people. One of the many examples of this is how many people enjoy a sport like soccer. Although they all feel joy from soccer, the joy that various people feel from soccer is still different from one another due to their individual experiences. These experiences that a human goes through are the deciding factors in what the human enjoys. These experiences are also tied to the development of what a human values. Someone like me who grew up with the lessons of how to treat others correctly is going to have different values than someone who was taught that others have no value. Although people are able to learn more and change their values through more experiences, the base values that someone is taught determine the start of the human’s journey. The empathy that I was taught has helped me go through anger issues and depression by allowing me to understand the value of life. This has allowed me to find joy in helping others but someone with a different start can lead to them finding joy in hurting others. I think that the “joy” someone feels can be forced upon them by being manipulated. Someone close to me was manipulated into moving back to the United States of America and they don’t have the means to leave after finding out they were tricked. They didn’t want to come back here but they were able to find enjoyment while here. Although it might be genuine joy, they were still manipulated into coming back here. This person really affects my life and yet I still can’t tell if their joy was a result of a choice they were willing to make. Having someone close to me who has some of their enjoyments in life as a result of something they were forced to do makes me question if other people’s joy is the result of something similar. This is especially the case for people who find enjoyment in something that I doubt I would find enjoyment in. Do the murderers and people who like Pepsi enjoy what they do because they were forced to? I don’t have the desire to kill people because I have empathy as a result of my experiences. I don’t like Pepsi because my taste buds are correct. Pepsi tastes as if carbonated liquid sugar was rotten. The thought process of deducing the reason people enjoy things and if I can enjoy something is continually affecting me today. I want to try new things that I think could bring me joy but looking at other people’s hobbies can make me concerned if the hobbies are extremely harmful to others. I feel like acknowledging this thought process can help me find more enjoyment in my life but I still worry about people who are forced to find joy in the situations they are forced into. I want people to be able to find true joy in what they seek as long as it doesn’t harm others. I don’t want anyone else to feel like they are restricted due to what situation they were forced into. I don’t want anyone else to feel as though someone close to them isn’t experiencing the joy they truly wish for. My life so far has allowed me to value my experiences. I am including all of my experiences no matter how good or bad I felt at the time. These experiences have still resulted in me being able to experience true joy. Those who have never had this privilege are those who I wish to be able to gain this privilege. I feel that no one else should bear the feeling of not discovering what it truly means to feel joy. I wish for everyone to discover their true essence.

The chapters containing the secret club left me very confused, particularly chapter 38 where Moira was talking about her escape attempt. The only thing I could think about when reading this section was the eyes’ involvement with it. There is no way they dont know the club exists. Let’s establish that first. Throughout the book various characters are scared the rooms in the houses are bugged, if the eyes have a reach like that, there is a very small chance they don’t know about the club. During chapter 38 on page 243, when Moira and Offred are talking in the bathroom they say, “I look up at the ceiling. ‘Is it bugged?’ …. ‘Probably,’ says Moira.” The people working there assume the eyes know everything about everything all the time.

Why don’t the eyes shut it down? They seem to spend more time and energy busting smaller crimes in the gilead like a single x-handmade Moira escaping. They go through all that energy for a single person and yet there is a club with countless people breaking the rules and they don’t shut it down. This is one of those situations where the eyes could shut it down but then their whole system falls apart. all the commanders are protected because of their numbers. Maybe the eyes can afford to replace that many commanders at once. If they busted all the commanders word would spread and the act of rebellion the club symbolized might give people in the Red Center hope.

Another possibility is that the eyes let it exist so that all the trouble making and rule breaking happens in a more confined hidden away place. If the club is abolished all the rule breaking might spread to other places less hidden from the general public. Later in the chapter when Moira is talking about how she was captured something just seemed off. She said “I won’t go into what happened after that. I’d rather not talk about it. All I can say is that they didn’t leave any marks.” (248) This just doesn’t seem like Moira’s character at all. In the beginning of the book she is portrayed to be the brave reckless one, escaping, threatening to kill one of the Aunts. And now all a sudden she doesn’t want to talk about what the eyes did to her after she got caught. It seems like there wasn’t physical pain, but maybe more of a psychological torture or conditioning. Something that would alter her character into not wanting to speak on it. Possibly this is related to the earlier quote about the room being bugged.

My running theory is she told Offred too much and the eyes came back and took her. The chapter ends with a very ominous “I never saw her again.”(250) so possibly that was connected. But why did the eyes let her come back to gilead in the first place? They caught her trying to escape and they just let her come back to the club. And she seemed content at the club. Like she was done running. That doesn’t seem like her. The eyes sent her back to work at the club, so it’s confirmed that they knew about it, they just didn’t want her at the red center. The eyes seem to be weirdly human. They gave Moira a choice of what she wanted to do after she directly broke the law. Overall the chapter was very confusing to me, there’s so much mystery around the eyes and what their intent is.

Chain Gang - Sam Cooke

This song would be in the opening showing the Handmaid’s and Martha’s. The scene would go back and forth between the Martha’s doing their various tasks like cleaning, cooking, and doing various tasks and the Handmaid’s having sex with the commanders during the ceremony. The continuous background “huh, hah, huh, hah” sound will represent the labor they are doing throughout the day. In the chorus Cooke repeats “That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang”. That line is essential to why I chose it because the irony highlights the fact that this labor is being done by women. The “chain gang” represents that they are trapped in their “reduced circumstances” and not doing this labor by choice.

Freedom (feat. Kendrick Lamar) - Beyonce

This song is all about Moira. But it isn’t just Moira’s experience, it is what she represents for the other Handmaids. The chorus makes a very noticeable connection to Moira as she escaped her post in an attempt to get out of Gilead to start a new life, or maybe return to some sense of her old life. This scene can start with Offred dreaming. Dreaming of Moira tying up Aunt Elizabeth and walking out of the center. This scene would be before Moira tells Offred what actually happened. Instead of the scene being what actually happened to Moira, it would be Offred dreaming of Moira pulling off this great escape that she hopes he can mimic. The main part that separates this song from moira’s true story is the “Ima keep on runnin’ ‘cause a winner don’t quit on themselves”. Moira quit. Or maybe not. She realized her circumstances and chose the best, realistic option.

“”Moira” I say. “You don’t mean that.” She is frightening me now, because what I hear in her voice is indifference, a lack of volition” pg. 249

This is why it’s a dream. Deep down Offred likely can’t even imagine what it would really be like to escape. So her mind keeps running away. Away from becoming content.

That’s What I Want - Lil Nas X

When becoming a Handmaid, Offred lost a lot of things from her old life, including love. Offred often remembers her husband fondly, rarely mentioning the rough parts of their relationship. Song lyrics: “These days are way too lonely” This scene will be another night scene where Offred is wanting to be held. Wanting to feel like someone valued her and her body, not just her womb.

“I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not” pg. 97

Those feelings are the essence of this song. The opening line “Need a boy who can cuddle with me all night” is exactly what Offred wanted when thinking of Luke before Nick walked in the room. Those feelings of being wanted were so strong to Offred that she almost took a huge risk and had sex with Nick. Song lyrics” I want someone to love me”

Enjoy Yourself (feat. KAROL G) - Pop Smoke

In this scene, the Commander takes Offred to Jezebel’s for the first time. This scene starts off very intimate with the two of them in the Commander’s room back at the house. We watch Offred change clothes into her costume and metaphorically, subtly hints at Offred letting some of the Gilead principles that have plagued her for so long leave her body with her clothes. She puts on makeup, which she hasn’t done in a while.

“For a moment I think I won’t be able to do any of this, and my first time with the eyeliner leaves me with a smudged black lid” pg. 231

This song serves both as a love song from the Commander to Offred, but also a moment where Offred can be free. Song lyrics: “They say, fly girls have more fun, So what? So you should enjoy yourself”. The lyrics represent the Commander bringing Offred out and showing her off, and even though Offred knows this is what she’s doing, she doesn’t take this time for granted and has a drink before ducking off to meet Moira. Song lyrics: “You don’t gotta put your cup down, drink freely, and holla at me if you need me, baby you should enjoy yourself”

UUHH - Teezo Touchdown

For this scene there isn’t much to it. We know how long the sexual tension between Nick and Offred has been building. We also know how much Offred has been longing for passionate, intimate sex. Holding nothing back, Teezo Touchdown’s vocals on “UUHH” perfectly capture these emotions during what would be Nick and Offred’s sex scene. I’m not going to describe a made up sex scene in details but here are some of the lyrics: “You know what’s on my mind, I know what’s on your mind”, “I know that you’re nervous, I’m kinda nervous too”, “First I’m gonna Uh, then I’m gonna uh-uh, uh-uh, and that’s gon’ make you uh-uh-uh”. You get the gist.

In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Offred and other handmaids express their need for love, hoping for love to come to fruition in their lives as a way of escaping their current role and situation in Gilead. “Falling in love, we said: I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion…”. This excerpt from the story captures Offred’s desire to love. What she considers love to be is love from god sharing how god loves his people showing the prominent religion that Offred ties close to.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood says how important love is, especially for Offred and the other women in Gilead. They talk about “falling in love,” which shows how much they want love in their lives. Offred thinks about love in a religious way, like how God loves people. This connects to her strong religious beliefs. When I read this part of the story, I could see similarities between Offred’s beliefs about love and my own ideas about what love means.

Love is a big word with lots of meanings. It’s not just about romance. It can be about family, friends, or even things we really care about. When I think about love, the most important kind for me is the love I have for my family. This love is so strong and unbreakable because I know my family will always be there for me no matter what.

The book shows that Offred’s idea of love is linked to her religious beliefs. She thinks about love like the way God cares for people. In the society she lives in, Gilead, religion is a huge part of everyone’s life. Offred hopes for a love that’s like the love of God – something strong, pure, and everywhere. It’s not just about romantic love for her. It’s about a deeper connection, a spiritual kind of love.

My own understanding of love is more tied to my family. The love I have for them gives me a feeling of safety and happiness. I know they’ll support me no matter what happens. It’s not about religion for me, but about this special bond that family brings. In the story, love is not just romantic. It’s about different kinds of relationships. Offred and the other handmaids have a deep need for love, connection, and freedom. They talk about “falling in love” as a kind of belief, a hope for something better. This shows that love is not just about being in a relationship with someone. It’s about the feeling of closeness and care that you share with people around you.

For me, love isn’t just about romance either. It’s also about the strong bond I share with my friends. We support each other, have fun together, and help each other through tough times. This kind of love isn’t romantic, but it’s so important in my life. The book made me think that love changes over time. As life goes on and we meet new people and experience new things, our feelings of love can also change. The love for something or someone might grow or become different. It’s like a flower that keeps on blooming, changing its colors and shape as time goes by.

The most important thing about love, according to the book and in my life, is that it’s always there, even if it changes. Offred’s hope for love, in a society where it’s restricted, is like a light in the darkness. It shows that love is a powerful force that can help us get through tough times, even if it’s just hope. Thinking about the similarities between Offred’s ideas about love and my own, I can see that love is a big part of everyone’s life. It’s not just about romance, but about the different connections we have with family, friends, or things we care deeply about. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a reminder that love is a huge, complex thing. It’s not just one feeling, but a mix of feelings and connections. It’s about finding closeness and care with the people around us. Whether it’s the hope for something better, the bond with family, the connection with friends, or the passion for something we love, it all shows the different sides of love and how it affects our lives in many ways.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale” brainwashing is a topic brought up multiple times and it affects the characters’ choices, the things they do, and the big events that happen. One example that came up is on page 174 where they explain how the big newspapers would censor certain things from the public also in previous pages it would talk about people being told to burn books and magazines. The reason why, is because the government doesn’t want them to learn and get new ideas which could harm the government. The government in Gilead would also do things like forcing people to burn their clothes and dress according to their role in this society.

This situation has been seen worldwide throughout history and everyone has experienced propaganda and what it can do to the way you think. My parents are a perfect example of growing up to think a certain way because they grew up in Communist Albania where they were taught to think the way the government wanted them. Going to school for them was very different because most of what they were learning was to make the communist ideologies seem like it was the best for everyone. They would have classes specifically about Marxism where they were being fed information about the ideology and how great it was, they were also taught that going to the military was a good thing and that it was the right thing to do even though it was mandatory to join. The people that believed in the propaganda the most were the older people, around my grandparent’s age, and still, some younger people now who support socialist parties in Albania. But some people hate communism with a passion because of what they went through as a child, growing up with nothing.

When you compare the two you see a lot of similarities because they both were manipulated by a government that wanted people to think like them also they both had to live the way the government thought was best. One thing that would happen in this book is rigged elections brought up on page 174 which shows how they wanted a way to trick the people into thinking everything was fair but it was not. You would see things like this in countries like Russia where they say they are democratic countries but when there are elections the people who come up against Putin mysteriously pass away. Also at this point of the story it seems like whoever is in control is a dictator and no one can do anything about it, just like in Albania when the dictator Enver Hoxha was in power until he passed away. One thing you could say is seen in both situations is people’s connections with the government because there are people in “The Handmaid’s Tale” who fully believe in the government like the aunts while you have people in the book who hate the government and do things which if they were caught doing they would have to face heavy consequences, just like people in Albania who hate communism and the other people who were crying like they lost their child when the dictator Enver Hoxha passed away. People in Albania have tried to escape by going to Greece or other nearby countries to leave the oppression and live a normal life where they could be free to do whatever, the people in Gilead think the same, and even in chapter 35 Offred and Luke try to escape and while they are they are thinking about their past lives and what it was like to be free.

While reading this book you can see that Margaret had many inspirations from the past by taking things done by dictators to see how to make the world seem as dystopian as possible. The author has done this many times by making different connections to the real world and it is all through the point of view of someone a lot of people can relate to (not me). Looking back to all that I have read made me think how much I take things for granted because of the conditions my parents grew up in and what they had to go through under communism things can still change like in the book because the world was normal not too long ago and things can change fast.

Track your own intellectual and emotional experience through a close reading of a particular section. You are encouraged to tackle sections that you have found confusing, uncomfortable, or intriguing. You can write this in first person, citing specific examples from this selection as well as other parts of the novel that connect these ideas. Your selected text can be as short as one sentence or paragraph, and should not be from one of the sections we’ve used as an all-class close reading.

Chapter 33 page 217: “I just want to go home, Janine said. She began to cry. Jesus God, Moria said. Thats enough. She’ll be here in one minute, I promise you. So put your goddamn clothes on and shut up. Janine kept whimping but she also stood up and started to dress. She does that agains and i’m not here, Moria said to me, you just have to slap her like that. You cant let her go slipping over the edge. That stuff is catching. She must have already been planning,then, how she was going to get out.”

While reading this whole part of chapter 33, I started to get disturbed towards the end of it. I think I picked this part of the passage becuase it made me feel the most uncomfortable. This really goes into deep of the fear the women in this world must have for the men. Also it reveals a new way of thinking and intereperating the book. How the women have to treat eachother to keep going. To try to keep each other safe. This is just one of many times that you can see this cleary in this part of the book. The part where the author says, “She’ll be here in one minute, I promise you. So put your goddamn clothes on and shut up,” gives a chilling but well advised directivie. Its strict but with purpose. Theres a clear reason why Moria said this. Not to be mean but to help out. Unfortunately, moria lets janine get hit anyway. In this world however the women dont have much say. I also want to focus on how much abuse and tramua you would have to go throughin order to be okay with all the oppresion to your own gender. Towards the end of this, Moria sees it as you didnt do what you should have done now you need to face your consequences. A twisted vision on how women are treated. This makes me also think that maybe a situation or situations like this have happened similar to maria, and that is why she is more okay with it. Moria’s comment, “She does that again, and I’m not here, you just have to slap her like that,” showcases the brutal measures taken to stifle emotions in this dystopian world. Physical violence is employed to suppress any outward signs of sadness, further emphasizing the society’s cruelty and the inescapable sorrow that engulfs its inhabitants.

Even going back a little bit in the paragraph before that made me feel uncomfortable, a feeling that this book has made me feel many times throughout my reading. Page 216 reads, “They wont send you to the infirmary, so dont even think about it. Moria said, They wont mess around with trying to cure you.s They wont even bother to ship you to the colnies.” Moria’s statement, “They won’t send you to the infirmary, so don’t even think about it,” immediately introduces an air of hopelessness. In the world of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the government’s primary concern is maintaining control and enforcing strict gender roles. The welfare of the individual, especially of a Handmaid, is of little consequence. This complete disregard for the physical and emotional well-being of the Handmaids is a source of profound sadness. It reflects a society where suffering is normalized, and the value of human life has been diminished to the point where any attempts at “curing” or helping the afflicted are futile. The amount of human degrading in this part was crazy to me when I first read as well. She says wont even bother shipping you to the colonies like she isnt enough. Moria acts like she is so damage that she isnt even good enough to a place where the dehumane women every single day. A place where the treat women like they are not humans and usual are sent there to die.

In our last reading, the ¨underground club¨ like scene stood out to me more than anything else has so far. It was action packed, and arguably the most significant part of the book.

The craziness of this scene started off before the party with Offred and the commander alone. The commander ¨gifted¨ what sounded like a lingerie costume type of piece to Offred. Of course, as if getting this piece wasn’t already a big enough shock with it´s illegality in Gilead, Offred noted that this piece also appeared to be used.

Once Offred and the Commander were ready, Nick would chauffeur them past ¨checkpoints¨ to the location of the party, and Offred would need to duck down along the way. Offred noted that Nick seemed familiar with the route to take and the time to return. Her suspicion of this being a routine event for the Commander, with other women who potentially even wore her same outfit, was clear.

Once at the hotel lobby, Offred and the commander walked into a fancy party, cautious of not drawing attention. For Offred, this should have been an all time highlight! The first taste of fun since she lived outside of Guilead! But it wasn’t ; her already uncomfortable night was somehow worsened.

Offred described sitting down on a couch for the first part of the party. Around her, similarly dressed party goers in costumes lingered. But who were they? At first this seemed unclear to Offred. But soon later, the commander would go up to a group of men to, as Offred described, both show off to the men by pointing her out and show off to her by showing his many friends.

With this, the people at the party became more clear: they seemed to be women, and other powerful figures of Guilead. It seemed like Offred immediately understood what this meant. She had been living in this awful society for so long, valued solely for her reproductive use and literally named after the commander (Of-fred). Yet with all of this, the people of power in Gilead were hypocrites?! Blatantly breaking many of Guilead´s rules together in a party setting?! As I read this, I couldn’t imagine many things that would have been more demeaning to Offred. As if things weren’t already bad enough. Because of the obvious significance, choosing this to create an art piece was a no brainer. For my piece, I used a platform called ¨Dall-e¨ to make an AI generated image. In generating the image, I described ¨a hotel lobby party with fancy women and commanders lingering, with a couch at the front where a woman and man sit¨. I was pleased with how the image included everything, but what I like most is the blurriness. In Offred’s description of the scene, it seemed crazy, secretive and mysterious. The level of the blurriness did a perfect job of portraying all the knowns (Offred gave us) of the scene like the fancy outfits, couch and lobby - yet making it unclear: open to interpretation.

This scene in the handmaid's tale is when Offred and Serena Joy have an unlikely interaction where Serena who has been more known to be a rule follower, takes a photo of Offred's child from the old world and shows it to Offred in an act of kindness. But really It’s just to push her own agenda. She now is the holder of information that Offred wants, but during this interaction, Offred has feelings and thoughts about learning this information. She reflects on the meaning of being a mother. She says “But she exists in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Bette she’d brought me nothing”(228). This is contradictory to before in the book when she asked for knowledge from the commander. But now she is regretting gaining this knowledge. So that begs the question, What is knowledge? A blessing or a curse? Does it depend on the situation? And why does this pain her more than help her. Before this, she thought that asking for knowledge was getting answers and also power. And as humans it makes sense because curiosity is a very human trait. But what does knowledge bring with it? Darkness? Offred seems to think that knowing too much can kill you. 
The longer the book goes on, her view of knowledge grows and changes according to how it makes her feel. In many ways knowledge is useful and brings a lot of benefits the majority of the time. But in contrast to that, information can hurt people mentally. Like Offred, people will want to know things (especially when it relates to them directly), and sometimes it will hurt, but really it’s dependent on multiple factors. Like who the person is, how they take the information (like interpret it), and what the information is to them. 
Knowledge makes it so you can’t imagine as much information. For example in the picture above, she learns that her daughter is still alive and thriving, but the catch is that she’s experiencing life without Offred who wished to be a part of it. Now that Offred knows this she can’t imagine that her daughter escaped, or died. It doesn’t give her the closure she so wanted from the photo. Now her imagination is more limited and she can’t indulge in those same fantasies. 

In chapter thirty-six of The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred is taken on a “date” to an underground club called “Jezebel’s” with the Commander. Throughout this scene, the reader is made to feel uncomfortable.

From the beginning of the situation, we sense something strange about the Commander that night. “‘Tonight I have a little surprise for you,’ he says. He laughs;” (pg 229) Offred describes it as a “snigger.” We as readers, like Offred, aren’t yet sure what he finds funny or why he emphasized little in his proposal. Offred also says he wishes to diminish things, like her, when talking about something. By definition, “diminish” means to make someone or something seem less valuable. The Commander wants to continue to feel powerful and the only way to do that is to make others seem less. To get ready for the club, the Commander does Offred’s makeup with old products and makes her wear a big cloak that we are led to believe belongs to Serena Joy. Offred decides to do it herself and finds it difficult to do so. “For a moment I think I won’t remember how to do any of this,” The entire scene focuses on Offred getting back into the habit of something she did before it was forbidden for her.

“He slips around my waist a tag, purple on an elastic band, like the tags for airport luggage. ‘If anyone asks you, say you’re an evening rental,’ he says.” (pg 233) We as readers are able to understand, without context, that women of Gilead can be rented for the night for whatever the men so please.

When they get to Jezebel’s, Offred sees women and men lounging around. As stated, the women are dressed in “festive gear”, “olden-days lingerie”, bikinis, and cheerleader uniforms while the men are in work clothes. From the description of the extravagant clothes and make-up the women wear, which contrasts the average clothes the men wear, we know Jezebel’s is a risque club. The dissimilarity between the women working at the club and Offred could symbolize the two truths to Gilead. On one hand, it prides their women on modesty and tradition. It also oppresses women; as seen with Offred wearing a bulky cloak that doesn’t belong to her. On the other hand, men are lusting after women in little clothing; wanting something that is not seen as “Holy.”

The Commander shows off Offred. “The Commander does the talking for me, to this man and to the others who follow him. He doesn’t say much about me, he doesn’t need to. He says I’m new, and they look at me and dismiss me and confer together about other things. My disguise performs its function.” (pg 236) We see the men not care much about the women who are evening rentals. This tells us that Jezebel’s is a club meant for relaxing without the rules of Gilead applying to women so they may objectify them however they want.