For the opening song on my playlist, I chose “A House in Nebraska” by singer-songwriter Ethel Cain. The song is off of Cain’s breakout album “Preachers Daughter.” “Preachers Daughter” tells the story of the fictional character Ethel Cain, voiced and created by Hayden Anhedonia (Cain’s legal name.) Ethel Cain is a young woman from the Florida swamps, born into a Southern Baptist family. Her father (the preacher) dies, Ethel is shunned by her strict, religious community, and runs away with a man who goes on to drug her, pimp her out, and abuse her. In the end, she ends up being murdered and cannibalized by a different lover. In a way, this story alone reflects the experience of women in Gilead. Passed from one cruel mistress to the next, from the Aunts to the Commander’s Wives, inevitably cursed to die a sad death, eaten alive by the patriarchal surveillance machine. “A House in Nebraska” comes earlier in the story, though, when Cain’s first love Willoughby disappears from their town. She yearns for him, yearns for a time “Where the world was empty, save you and I / Where you came and I laughed, and you left and I cried / Where you told me even if we died tonight, that I’d die yours,” This verse is reminiscent of Offred’s yearning for her past like. Her past marriage, full of love, her baby who was produced by this great love. On page 97, she thinks “I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name.” But, both Ethel and Offred have been subdued in one way or another and have now succumbed to their isolation, accepting it. While Ethel sings “I feel so alone / I’m so alone out here without you, baby” Offred thinks to herself “I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this waiting.” (Atwood 122)

Next up in the queue is 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” a dreamy jukebox single about using someone for the services they provide, then moving to the next, never considering the hearts or minds of the unlucky individuals who cross your path. “I keep your picture upon the wall / It hides a nasty stain that’s lying there” While there would never be a photo of a Handmaid hung on a wall, other than maybe as a cautionary tale or on a wanted poster, the “picture upon the wall” within Offred’s world is more or less the babies that “hide the nasty stain” of the Commanders Wives inability to reproduce. Early on, Offred thinks about the Commander, and how she feels about him; “I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.” (Atwood 58) Into the 24th chapter of the book, Offred’s relationship with the Commander begins to shift. You could almost imagine the commander listening to these lines (if he has a secret way of enjoying music, that is) and pondering his next move with her: “I like to see you, but then again / That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me / So if I call you, don’t make a fuss / Don’t tell your friends about the two of us”

Shifting gears, Radiohead’s “Let Down” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” are opposite sides of the same coin. They show two responses to a controlling Power that looms over its people, two paths a citizen of Gilead could go down. In “Let Down”, Yorke sings that he wants to “grow wings / A chemical reaction / Hysterical and useless.” Like Offred and her contemporaries, who long for a way out, but know that their desires are futile, just hysterical attempts. “Fight the Power” takes a contrary stance to this belief that the people’s indignations are pointless, yelling out that instead we must “fight the powers that be”. While Public Enemy may not have been referring to a dystopian patriarchal power, their protests align with many of Offred’s thoughts, and the ideals of radical groups in Gilead. On page 106 she talks at length about all the places she thinks Luke might have ended up, one of them being with a group of radicals-maybe Quakers-who are trying to “revolutionize, make a change.”

In 1959, Nina Simone released “The Other Woman”, singing from the perspective of a woman whose husband has been unfaithful. She’s jealous of the mistress-she “is perfect where her rival fails / and she’s never seen with pin curls in her hair, anywhere.” In 2014, on her album “Ultraviolence” Lana del Rey covered the song. Del Rey sings from the perspective of the mistress. She’s jealous of the wife of the man she’s having an affair with, she knows that “The other woman will never have his love to keep / And as the years go by, the other woman will spend her life alone.” Del Rey and Simone sing the same lyrics, and in a way they’re one in the same, but they convey different points of view. Offred and Serena Joy fulfill the same roles. Each woman wishes she could be the other-at their first meeting Serena commands that Offred remember “[The Commander] is just that; my husband. Till death do us part,” and that she wants to see “as little of you as possible.” Offred is jealous of Serena’s creature comforts. Her cigarettes; “I looked at the cigarette with longing”, and her allowance to engage in frivolous housewife activities like knitting, flipping through the TV, having cookies and tea with the other Wives. Maybe Serena doesn’t “cry herself to sleep” like Simone wrote, but she cries during Ceremonies. She doesn’t “keep fresh cut flowers in each room” but on page 81 she wears “one of her best dresses, sky blue with embroidery in white along the edges of the veil: flowers and fretwork” to the Ceremony. Del Rey’s rendition speaks more to Offred’s experience-not just because before everything happened, she was the other woman “when Luke was still in flight from his wife.” (Atwood 50)-but because that’s the category that she has been placed in under His Eye.

(NOTE: it says there’s 6 songs, but that’s just because I put 2 versions of the same song-I hope that didnt break the rules too much.)