Link to my research paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvJzpZVXcmHOo2spzwKfZbein4YG5FfM/view?usp=drive_link

Link to the website I coded (site doesn’t work well on a phone, please access on a computer): https://capstone-nine-mu.vercel.app/

Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UCPA3__f5rflnCieB2efGecUzY5PGxRscATbTmYvCD8/edit?usp=sharing

For my Capstone I wrote a research paper about client-centered public defense. Client-centered public defense is when public defenders - lawyers who represent defendants who cannot afford a private attorney - view their obligation to their client as more than just resolving the client’s legal case. Client-centered defense involves forming a relationship with the client and addressing their needs and desires beyond the criminal case. To complete this paper, I spent the majority of the school-year doing research. I read five books and a number of articles related to this topic. I chose this project in part because I wanted to get more practice writing research papers before college. I ended up learning a lot both about researching and writing a paper as well as the American criminal justice system. My paper discusses some of the ways that the criminal justice system is failing defendants, but also how client-centered representation might address some of these problems.

After finishing my paper, I decided that I wanted to share what I had learned both about writing a paper and the criminal justice system while doing a little more learning. I eventually decided to code a website from scratch to share this information and get experience coding. Before this I had only created basic coding projects, so for the base of my website, I followed along with a tutorial. Once I had a functional website I changed and expanded some of the code to create a unique site that shares what I learned.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has provided me with interesting insights about the importance and also the potential consequences of challenging authority. Throughout the book, McMurphy is seen as a rebellious con man, who is trying to disrupt the natural order of the ward for his own gain. While this might be true, McMurphy’s actions have also had a real positive effect on the ward. An example of this is when Bromden says, “In the group meetings there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn’t like.” (144) While the patients’ sudden desire to address their issues with the ward could be interpreted as just annoying or a problem, I see it as a great thing. The ward is where the patients spend their lives and they have a right to make it as enjoyable a space as possible within reason. To me this shows the positive impact that one person’s challenges on authority can have for a group of people.

This idea of one person’s challenges on authority inspiring a group of people has a personal connection to me because of my job. The restaurant I work at has many issues, many of which are in some way affected by management. For example there are regularly too many people scheduled for each shift, and because the employees share tips, this means that no one makes as much money as they could and should. Whenever issues like this are brought up with our manager she often gets angry and tries to change the subject to things staff members should be doing differently or says that the way things are is how our owner wants them and is out of her control. Whether or not this is true, she clearly does not make any serious attempts to improve our situation. She is also generally disliked by the staff and yells at employees over minor things, disappears to her office while the restaurant is open and servers need her help and much like the big nurse, she acts as though any valid complaints from employees are personal attacks and gets angry. While some people are occasionally willing to bring up complaints to her, we generally feel forced to simply tolerate the issues with the restaurant. McMurphy’s actions in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” have made me think about what really standing up to her might do. If one person voiced their opinion it could inspire others to do the same and put pressure on our manager to make changes.

While One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest shows the potential positive impact of standing up to an authoritative figure, it also provides a warning about the potential consequences. After creating a stir in the ward, McMurphy seems to realize that the Big Nurse’s position of power allows her to do some serious harm to him. Bromden explains this to the reader and says, “They can understand as well as I can that the only way he’s (McMurphy’s) going to get the Big Nurse to lift his commitment is by acting like she wants.” (150) In the same way that the Big Nurse has the power to extend someone’s commitment, my manager at work has the power to fire people. Being fired from a restaurant may not be as serious as extended confinement in a mental hospital, but it is obviously something to consider, especially for those who are adults living off of the money they earn at my restaurant.

These similarities to the situation at my job have made me think more about our relationship with our manager. While I can’t say that One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest will be the reason that I start arguing for change at my job, especially being the non confrontational person I am, I do think it is interesting to consider the potential outcomes of speaking up. The book also emphasizes for me just how little power those under the influence of an authoritative figure are. Like the patients in the ward, the degree to which some sort of real movement for change could succeed relies almost entirely on how far our manager would allow it to go. Just as the Big Nurse can send anyone to the Disturbed ward or extend someone’s commitment, our manager can fire as many people as she wants and still find replacements in the high turnover restaurant industry. The similarities between the situation at my restaurant and the ward in One Flew Over the Cukoos’ Nest have given me a new perspective on challenging authority in that sort of environment.

Don’t Stop Believin’ - Journey
While this song has a level of positivity to it that Offred’s situation doesn’t, its name, which is repeated multiple times throughout the song, connects so well to Offred’s situation that I chose to include it. In many aspects of her life, Offred has continued to believe, and that belief seems to be what keeps her motivated. An example of this is Offred’s hope that Luke is still alive. On page 166, when she passes The Wall with Ofglen she says “When I can see the bodies, the actual bodies, when I can guess from the sizes and shapes that none of them is Luke, I can believe also that he is still alive.” Without this belief that her loved ones are somehow okay, Offred might very well lose her will to live given how horrible her situation is. For this reason, “Don’t stop believin” is a phrase that describes a crucial aspect of Offred’s life in Gilead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs

Here - Alessia Cara
I chose this song because it has strong similarities to Offred’s experience at Jezebel’s. The song is about someone who is at a party, but doesn’t want to be, and includes lines such as “I’m sorry if I seem uninterested / Or I’m not listenin’ or I’m indifferent / Truly, I ain’t got no business here,” and “But really I would rather be at home all by myself not in this room / With people who don’t even care about my well being” These lines seem to relate to Offred’s sense of being out of place at Jezebel’s. For example on page 240, Offred describes her attempt to meet Moira in the bathroom saying, “ I get up, wobble across the room. I lurch a little, near the fountain, almost fall. It’s the heels… Several of the men look at me, with surprise. I think rather than lust. I feel like a fool.” This quote shows how different Jezebel’s is to Offred’s typical environment and I think her feeling of discomfort in this moment relates to the emotions expressed in “Here.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKp2CrfmVfw

Cold - Maroon 5
I chose this song because I saw a strong connection between it and the Commander and Serena Joy’s relationship. The song describes a relationship in which the singer Adam Levine, and the subject of the song have drifted apart. Adam Levine sings that he feels that the subject of the song is “cold” towards him. While Margaret Atwood hasn’t revealed the details of the Commander and Serena Joy’s relationship before Gilead, coldness has certainly become a central theme in their relationship at the time in which the book is written. One example of this is at the beginning of the Ceremony when Offred says, “The Commander knocks at the door. The knock is prescribed: the sitting room is supposed to be Serena Joy’s territory, he’s supposed to ask permission to enter it. She likes to keep him waiting. It’s a little thing, but in this household little things mean a lot.” (86) Petty displays of power, such as Serena Joy’s behavior in this quote, do not indicate a happy relationship, which is why “Cold” is a fitting song to describe their marriage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XatXy6ZhKZw

Somebody to Love - Basstrologe
I chose this song because it repeats the lines “Don’t you want somebody to love?; Don’t you need somebody to love?; Wouldn’t you love somebody to love?; You better find somebody to love.” This relates to The Handmaid’s Tale, because one of the biggest things missing from everyone’s lives seems to be loving relationships. For example, when the Commander secretly meets with Offred to play Scrabble for the first time and asks her to kiss him, she does so, but then he says, “Not like that. As if you mean it.” (140) To me this shows the Commander wants to convince himself that there is some real connection between himself and Offred, when in reality, that is impossible given the fact that she is essentially his slave. I think that this is a reflection of the loneliness that all of the characters feel due to the lack of real relationships in Gilead. Despite all the power the Commander has, all of his relationships seem to be defined by the rules of Gilead: none of them are natural or based on emotion. I think that this is Margaret Atwood’s way of making a point very similar to the idea that “Don’t you need somebody to love.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRLRymTR_rA

How Long - Charlie Puth
While “Cold” relates to Serena Joy’s relationship with the Commander in general, I think that “How Long” connects to the impact that the Commander’s secret meetings with handmaid’s has on Serena Joy. This is a song about cheating in a relationship. In the song, Charlie Puth sings, “How long has this been goin’ on? / You’ve been creepin’ ‘round on me / While you’re callin’ me ‘Baby.’” Atwood doesn’t tell the reader exactly how Serena Joy reacted when she found out that the last handmaid was secretly meeting the Commander. However, when the Commander is telling Offred what happened to the handmaid on page 187, Atwood does write, “‘She hanged herself,’ he says; thoughtfully not sadly… ‘Serena found out,’ he says, as if this explains it. And it does.” This quote at the very least implies that Serena Joy had a strong reaction when she discovered the meetings, which may have driven the handmaid to kill herself. This relates to “How Long” because while the Commander might not have been cheating on Serena Joy in the traditional sense, he was “creepin’ ‘round” on her. Gilead has already stripped away most of the meaning from the Commander and Serena Joy’s marriage, and then the Commander lied to her and broke rules that seem to matter to her. This means that it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for her to have felt as much pain as one would feel from being cheated on in the way that Puth describes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwfoyVa980U

In the first 24 chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale there are a number of sections that seem to contradict each other. It is not clear to me whether these are just oversights by the author that might be a result of her crafting an overly complicated world, or whether these were intentional and either say something about the narrator Offred, or exist to leave the reader in some confusion about Offred’s world.

One of the most obvious contradictions is the information we’ve been given about Moira. On page 124, while Janine is giving birth, the handmaid next to Offrred asks her, “‘Are you looking for anyone?’” to which Offred responds, “‘Moira.’” At first this seems to make sense because Moira was Offred’s and the reader is never told what happened to her, but a few pages later, new information makes this conversation very confusing. Pages 129 through 133 describe how Moira escaped the Center and on page 133 Offred tells the reader, “We expected her to be dragged in at any minute, as she had been before. We could not imagine what they might do to her this time. It would be very bad, whatever it was. But nothing happened. Moira didn’t reappear. She hasn’t yet.” If Moira escaped the Center and nobody has heard from her since it makes very little sense that Offred would expect to find her amongst the Handmaids. As we learned in Offred’s interaction with the doctor in Chapter 11, having sex with someone other than a Commander would be punishable by death for a handmaid, and handmaids who can’t have children are sent off to the colonies. This makes it seem very unlikely that if Moira were to have escaped the Center by dressing up as an Aunt they would have just let her return to being a handmaid. We also learned at the beginning of the book that gossip spreads amongst the women, especially through the Marthas. This makes it hard to believe that even if Moira was found and still became a handmaid, that Offred wouldn’t have heard about it.

This inconsistency in what we know about the fate of Moira could have a number of explanations. It could be a reflection of the desperation Offred feels to learn what happened to her friend, it could be that Offred knows more information than she has revealed or it could have been an oversight by the author, though this seems unlikely because these two moments happen close together in the book and are relatively significant. In the remainder of the book, some information might be given to clear this up, but details that don’t align in books are a major pet peeve for me and right now this inconsistency and others I’ve noticed in The Handmaid’s Tale, such as details we’ve been given about Offred’s mom, are lowering my overall opinion of the book considerably.

If the author does plan to address this particular inconsistency, it would have been my preference that she set this up in a different way. In mysteries, I personally like to be given enough information to at least make a guess at the solution, but in this case, at the very least I would have liked the author to make it clear that more information will be revealed about what happened to Moira. This way I would at least be wondering about that new information and not whether or not the author somehow made what seems to me to be a pretty obvious mistake.

Another contradiction that I’ve noticed is in the stories that Offred tells about her mother. The first of these stories is on page 38, where Offred describes a book burning that her mother took her to. Offred explains that a group of women and some men are burning magazines. One woman asks Offred’s mother if it is okay for Offred to burn a magazine which Offred describes as having a “pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from ceiling by a chain wound around her hands.” Offred’s mom agrees but tells the woman not to see the content of the magazine. This even seems to reveal two things about Offred’s mom: that she spends her time doing things like burning explicit magazines, which based on the setting of The Handmaid’s Tale in an ultra-religious society might lead the reader to believe that Offred’s mom is quite religious herself, and that she wants to protect her daughter from sexual material. Both of these ideas however are refuted later in the book.

In Chapter 20, Offred describes movies she and other women are shown in a reeducation camp, of events meant to shock the women into submission including women being tortured, raped and killed. One of these movies was different and showed Offred’s mom with a group of women carrying signs with messages such as “Freedom to Choose” and “Recapture our Bodies.” These signs indicate that this is some sort of feminist rally, which shows that she is very much against the patriarchal Christian movement that formed Gilead. Then, on page 145, Offred tells the reader,” The mistress – my mother explained mistress, she did not believe in mystification, I had a pop-up book of sexual organs by the time I was four.” This quote contradicts the idea that Offred’s mom wanted to protect her from sexual material. While it is possible to argue that Offred’s mom could have both been against pornographic material and relatively progressive in other areas of gender and sex, all of these moments taken together seem to give us an inconsistent picture of Offred’s mother. If she “doesn’t believe in mystification” and is okay with her daughter learning about sexual organs at the age of four, it doesn’t seem that she should be so worried about the destruction of sexual material, her daughter catching a glimpse of it.

These details about Offred’s mom, seem less significant than those about what happened to Moira. This means that I see no purpose for the author intentionally creating this inconsistency, which is particularly bothersome to me. While I don’t think that these inconsistencies make a huge difference in how I understand the story, they are something that I notice and have difficulty ignoring.