Lit Log #2

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”.