Disguises of Benevolence

One section of The Handmaid’s Tale that quickly caught my attention during my first reading was the beginning of chapter 15, where the Commander is introduced. Throughout the first fourteen chapters, Margaret Atwood references the Commander by title, but he is never directly shown to the reader. As I read these chapters, I found myself intrigued about who the Commander could be and what exactly his purpose was—aside from his status as head of the household—so this section was one of my most anticipated. Looking back, this portion of the book took me through several different states of mind and allowed my perspective on the world of Gilead to shift.

In the first paragraph of the chapter, much is already revealed about the relationship between the Commander and his Wife, Serena Joy. Serena waits in the sitting room alongside the Handmaids and Marthas as the Commander knocks on the door: “She likes to keep him waiting” (86). Offred notices that he enters without any response from Serena, and begins to wonder “Maybe he’s just forgotten the protocol, but maybe it’s deliberate. Who knows what she said to him, over the silver-encrusted dinner table? Or didn’t say” (86). My initial interpretation of this was that the Commander and Serena did not have a healthy relationship, at least at this point in the story. She seems to enjoy holding power over him, even in miniscule ways, showing little trust or confidence in his decisions. I think it is normal for people in a good relationship to act irritably toward one another at times, but for it to be a consistent behavior there must be some unresolved issue between them.

It is in this same scene that Offred describes the Commander’s appearance for the first time. This was an important piece to me because I had been wondering about it since the early chapters, so it took up most of my mind; however, I also noticed that Offred provided subtle hints about her past experience with him. As she looks over his face, she comments that he appears “genial but wary… But only at first glance” (86). She then describes his eyes as “falsely innocuous” (87) and despairs over “his disguises, of benevolence.” Just one of these lines would be suspicious on its own, but the fact that she continued to retrace this idea encouraged me to shift my attention to it. She sees his external appearance as a facade, so she must have experience with a different side of him. If his kindness is false, he must be either indifferent or cruel, and given that the women around him “flinch when he moves” (87), I found myself leaning toward the latter. I didn’t find myself exactly surprised at this, but I also felt like I hadn’t known what to expect. The Commander is hiding something, but what exactly? To me, Gilead seems similar to our world in some ways and vastly different in others, and these inconsistencies made it difficult to fully grasp how this society functioned, especially with the slow rate at which information is given throughout the story.

I still had several questions about what exactly the Commander’s purpose was in the household, and how Commanders contributed to Gilead in a broad sense. Many of these curiosities were answered as Offred continued her commentary, first describing how he and the Handmaids view one another; the Handmaids are “putting him on” while “he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot” (87). Following this, she thinks about “his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate stalked slug’s eye,” and everything clicked in my mind. This not only answered what I had been wondering about, but also connected to an entirely different question I hadn’t even thought of. In our class discussions, we described Handmaids as forced surrogates, but it had not occurred to me to contemplate who exactly they were acting as surrogates for. Offred’s descriptions made things clear: the Commander was the one impregnating them and “providing” children for his Wife. This explained why they were afraid of him, and why they saw through his kind mask. I wondered for a moment whether this was unique to the household Offred was in, but due to the uniform nature of Gilead and the pregnant Handmaid shown in an earlier chapter, I was more inclined to believe that this was the position that all Commanders filled.

Through these two pages, I went from having no idea who the Commander was to having a clear understanding of his place in Gilead and Offred’s life, as well as his marriage. Despite the pacing of the story feeling slow at times, Margaret Atwood packs information into the narrative down to each sentence, to the point where skimming while reading can lead to important details being missed. Taking time to read this section slowly and carefully helped me to better understand my own emotional journey through the pages, and documenting it has encouraged me to continue this strategy throughout the rest of the book.