“You can wet the rim of a glass and 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.” - page 103

The mind is a strange thing. It can use coping methods to make it through difficult times, but it can also delude. It can provide peace and solace, but it can also run amok with anxiety and stress about the future. The brain is so complex that it would be difficult to represent with a single image, but we try nonetheless. The artwork I created is an attempt to unpack the mind of Offred as the end of the narrative approaches.

Throughout the book, Offred uses the word “shatterproof” in relation to windows five times (as of the current reading)—on pages 8, 12, 52, and twice on 167. She mentions the word “shatter” even more often, and this repetition of her fixation on broken glass served as the main inspiration for this piece. Each shard of glass illustrates a different aspect of her mind—a memory, a thought to the future, or a single word—and at the center of the fragments is Offred herself, her internal exhaustion shown through her weary eyes. When initially drawing Offred’s face, I did not intend to make her appear old or wrinkled, but I feel that the final appearance connects strongly to how she sees herself as a Handmaid. She mentions on page 199 that “being a woman this way is how 1 used to imagine it would be to be very old.”

For the overall aesthetic of the artwork, I chose to use an airbrush to create vague, blurred shapes in each shard of glass. This decision allowed me to be more abstract with the artwork, and it was also a strong way to illustrate that these ideas floating around in Offred’s head are only reconstructions, not completely true representations of her thoughts or experiences. This, as a motif, is repeated several times in the narrative by Offred herself, so I felt that it would be important to refrain from creating crisp, clear images in the artwork.

The piece on the bottom right depicts a swarm of tiny Handmaids around the word “MAYDAY.” This is a representation of the Mayday rebellion, a mostly disorganized group of Handmaids that are trying to find a way to work against Gilead. Introduced to her through Ofglen, another Handmaid, Offred wants to help them by feeding information and doing what she can in her restrictive life. Another piece shows tendrils of smoke rising from a fire covering a house, a manifestation of Offred’s thoughts about burning the Commander’s house down and escaping: “Such a fine thought, it makes me shiver. An escape, quick and narrow” (209)

The remaining pieces contrast this looking forward, however; they represent Offred’s growing feeling of despair and powerlessness as she loses pieces of her past and is forced to reckon with her reality in Gilead. For example, one piece is an image of the Commander’s face, surrounded by Scrabble pieces that spell “Zilch.” Offred does directly spell out this word while playing Scrabble with the Commander on page 183, but I felt that it was a strong metaphor; zilch is defined as zero or nothing, and I used it to represent the idea that Offred feels helpless, both over her future and in the structure of Gilead as a whole.

Directly to the right of this, another shard of glass shows several twisting lengths of rope criss crossing through a dark void. In the background, the vague shape of a noose can be seen. This imagery was used to encompass all of Offred’s thoughts about the Handmaid that lived in her room before she did. She was initially a beacon of hope for Offred, leaving behind the message “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” meaning “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” (187). However, Offred later discovers through the Commander that the Handmaid hung herself to escape the dark reality of Gilead. She had held this Handmaid in her mind as an almost mythical figure, seeing her as an inspiration, and this news took that away. “Fat lot of good it did her,” she remarks later in the story. “Why fight?” (225).

Above these, the next fragment depicts Ofwarren, the pregnant Handmaid shown in an earlier stage of the book. I included this to represent Offred’s thoughts on her place as a Handmaid, but also as a reminder that she does not have much time left to fulfill her “purpose” in this society, the one enforced upon her by Gilead: giving birth. This idea is reinforced several times throughout the narrative by a variety of characters, from her doctor (page 61) to Serena Joy (page 204), and this serves to encourage Offred to do whatever it takes to have a child, even if she does not want to. She has little agency in the grand scheme of things, and this erodes her sense of self.

Another piece depicts blurred white figures with a faint glow. This represents Offred’s memories of her family before Gilead, of Luke and their daughter—on page 193, she attempts to remember them, but “they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak.” This is an attempt to look into the past, to fall back on fond reminiscence, but it doesn’t work; Offred has been overtaken by Gilead and cannot go back.

The glass shard in the top right corner shows the photo of Offred’s daughter that she receives from Serena Joy on page 228. She had been hoping to find her, even just see her one more time, for the entire story, but when she is given the photo, this optimism melts away. “You can see it in her eyes: I am not there,” she thinks. “I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that” (228). The word “OBLITERATED” floats above the photo, emphasizing that Offred feels her daughter has forgotten her. This is one of the most powerful pieces of imagery in the story, and it is one of the most effective at battering down Offred’s hope for the future. This goal she had been searching for the entire book has, in her eyes, been for nothing.

Finally, directly above Offred’s head is a piece that shows a pair of rabbit ears on a headband. This is a reference to her final encounter with Moira at Jezebel’s, where Offred discovers that she has been . “She is frightening me now,” Offred thinks, “because what I hear in her voice is indifference, a lack of volition” (249). Moira has been a rebellious figure for the entire story, and has served as an inspiration for Offred as she worked with Ofglen and the Commander. In this final interaction, however, that spirit has been taken out of her, and this is one of the most damaging losses in the story. “I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin… I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.” Another figure of hope in her life has been reduced, has lost an important piece of themselves, and this drives the stake of hopelessness even deeper into Offred’s mind.

This artwork is a culmination of Offred’s experiences in the story, a combination of little hopes and large despairs. I do not know what lies ahead for Offred, but I do not see a happy ending as very likely, given her loss of hope and agency.

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.