Worlds Colliding

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s story is split between the past and the present. Gilead, the dystopian world that has taken her freedom, purposely strips people of their individuality and autonomy as a tactic to control them. Gilead has put people into roles where they are not seen as full humans with individual stories. Despite the message that she should forget her past, Offred is wracked with memories of her old life, and is constantly grappling with the two sides of herself: her present situation and the woman she used to be.

During the day, when people are watching, Offred is occupied with her present self. At night she can return to her past. As she lies in bed in chapter 7, when she is deciding which moments from her past she should relieve in her head, she thinks, “The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will… Where should I go?” (49) I chose to portray this scene in my picture, because I think that it is an example of how she is living two lives simultaneously. In my picture, she is lying in her bed, wearing the outfit of a handmaid. Other than the red of her cloak, her room is black and white, to represent how bleak her present life is. I overlaid a transparent picture of a woman, also in color, on top of Offred to represent that the woman she used to be is still inside of her, and that it is impossible to strip that identity away from her completely. I hope that the contrast of the color to the black and white demonstrates the difference between her present and her memories of the past, and how she often feels like her real life is in the past while she is going through the motions of her days in Gilead.

The bubbles around Offred each display a different image from her past that she has returned to at some point during the book. I put them in bubbles because the way that she describes them makes them feel like little snapshots, or separate little chapters of her life as opposed to a complete narrative of her past. In my opinion, Atwood purposefully chose to include descriptions of the mundane moments of Offred’s past in addition to the bigger, more memorable events, because Offred misses those times the most. She often fixates on everyday things. When talking about meeting up with Luke, she said, “It’s the rooms themselves I miss as well… I was careless, in these rooms.” (67) Even though this image was not life changing, it was times like this that made up most of her past life, when she could do as she pleased. When thinking about Moira, she also remembered, “I had a paper due the next day. What was it?…On the floor there were books, open face down, this way and that, extravagantly.” (50) This is another example of a moment that, despite feeling small, meant a lot to her.

I also included the more significant moments, like someone trying to kidnap her child, “she was disappearing down the aisle, in the arms of a woman I’d never seen before. I screamed…” (83) Even though this is not a pleasant memory, I still chose to include it because of its significance to Offred’s past. The bubbles are each tinted differently, to show the various emotions correlated with each image, and this one is purple and orange to represent the fear that she felt. Offred is not scared of her bad memories, though, and returns to them just as much as her pleasant ones. She does not wish for a utopia, she wants a world where she has autonomy, even if that will come with hard times. These bubbles float around her to show that these memories are with her always, and follow her around, because they are who she is.