College English Lit Log # 1 The Handmaid’s Tale Rae Alexander October 12, 2023

Color and Style has been used to make statements and convey meanings between people for a long time. It’s all part of the 70% of communication that is non-verbal. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the characters are given uniforms with certain colors and style that communicate their status just like some of our own politicians do in our modern day. In the beginning we meet Offred, a woman with a blurry memory of her life from the time before and who is a handmaid. The handmaids have an interesting uniform. Offred says, “ Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood which defines us. The skirt is ankle length, full, gathered…”(8).Offred is swathed in a red cloak with “white wings” surrounding the face. Red is often recognized as the color of passion, or fierceness or blood. White is often associated with purity. Even without it being clearly stated we can see that there is a message being told to the reader about Offred and her role. In the world of Gilead, the Handmaids are respected by most of the public and carry a decent amount of status. Later on we learn that this is because their role is to “bear fruit” or carry the children of the commanders. They’re surrogates. Their role and the colors associated with their role tell not just the reader but the characters handmaid’s interact with in the story a great deal. Reflecting on how the characters of Gilead perceive the handmaids and their status and what it means within the society, is not completely a work of fiction. There are instances where women use colors and style to send a message to the public. For example, in 2019, congress women wore white as a call back to the suffragette white. It was said to be a “beacon of rebellion”, and was meant to emphasize the female presence on the house floor. Another instance was when Vice President Kamala Harris wore a purple inauguration coat. The mix of Democrat blue and Republican red, was a way to show unification between the two parties. To reference the quote cited earlier, Offred has to wear a long and flowing red cloak. It hides her figure for the most part, and covers a lot of skin, save for her face. There is a tone of modesty in the clothes she wears. Despite her role as a surrogate for the commander and his wife, Offred is shown to dress modestly and the white surrounding her face suggests a certain level of purity. “The white wings too are a prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.”(8). The handmaids are supposed to be modest and are forced to not be seen and to not see. They are hidden and made to hide. The reader may come to think that modesty is an oppressive kind meant to keep the citizens ignorant. Something akin to this-albeit to a lesser extent-is how dress codes are somewhat gender targeted. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had worn red nails and it became her signature. But when she was oathed, the dress code banned any ‘flamboyant’ nail polish colors and so her red nails were no more. There we again have that almost oppressive modesty. The color red is referenced again in real life and The Handmaid’s Tale. Justice Sotomayor’s signature red nail is banned because of its flamboyant nature. Red, once again, is a color of controversy, especially when women wear it. A lot of the time, in the real world, there is a push to stay away from red as a young girl or as a wedding guest because it draws attention. Red draws attention. Many people debate whether said attention is good or not but what people can agree on is that it certainly has all eyes on the person who wears it. Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is known for wearing a red lip a lot of the time. She says it’s a shout out to her Puerto Rican roots and it gives her a boost of confidence. It draws attention and boosts her confidence. But for red to be known as a traditionally bright and beacon of a color for the handmaids to have it as their color yet be said to not be seen is ironic. They’re bodies and status are to be seen but not talked about or acknowledged and their faces are surrounded in white. This could be a hint at perhaps their faces and individually not mattering anymore because of their status as surrogates to the commanders.

On Page 104 of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, the narrator ponders where her former husband Luke is now. She describes what remains of him in her mind: “his hair, the bones, the plaid wool shirt, green and black, the leather belt, the work boots. I know exactly what he was wearing…though not his face, not so well. His face is beginning to fade, possibly because it wasn’t always the same: his face had different expressions, his clothes did not.” The inanimate objects are easier to remember for her, because they are simple, and they remain the same. It is harder to capture someone’s whole essence in memory, because they are always changing like we are, and the face starts to fade because we cannot decide on an expression to save.

I know this feeling firsthand, as I have had to say goodbye to many people in my life. I’ve moved a fair amount, living in 3 main houses and 4 main schools. The moves used to affect me more. I used to cry over my friends being gone. And then my friends started to change. Once I didn’t see them anymore, it became harder and harder to keep an updated version of their faces in my mind. Like the narrator, my friends’ faces began to fade, frozen in time.

What I remember very clearly are the things I have kept in my memory box. What remains is this: the bubbles in a small white container, leftover from “Paint The Town Red”, a choir assembly in Chicago. The tape dispenser covered in scraps of paper from a friendly feud that say “Reese was right, Guz was wrong” and “Gus was right, Reese was wrong”. I can still remember the bubbles floating in the sea of red uniforms. I can remember the blue water bottle I stole and covered in my little notes. Though not their faces, not so well. They seem to fade in my mind, becoming people from a different story, becoming distanced. All I have left are these objects, and my own feelings. As the people I share the memories with fade, the memories themselves feel less real.

It feels like I’m in a void with relics from a different life, which is very similar to the experience of the narrator of “The Handmaid’s Tale”. She actually is living a different life, removed from almost everything and everyone she once knew. And she doesn’t even have anything physical to hold on to. Her thoughts are all she has to keep her sane and I think that is why she clings to the details like the clothes as much as I cling to my memory box. She needs to ground her story in something, needs to cling to whatever there is left. She needs some kind of proof that what she had before was real.

As the narrator speculates what has happened to Luke, she keeps using the phrase “I believe”. (Pages 104-105). At the end of the chapter she talks about how she believes her husband is alive and will come for her. “It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive”. In addition to the clothes she remembers and can hold on to, she has invented a hope. She has invented a message that she can picture, telling her that a savior is coming. The other beliefs she has, that Luke is dead or that he has been caught, are not as strong as the hope. Because it is the one thing that will prove Luke is real and that this nightmare will come to an end. In a world where the narrator is surrounded by an entirely new reality, she needs a hope that the old one will return. If she loses him, if she loses her last hope, she will have nothing to hold on to. By losing faith, by losing hope, she will lose herself. And there will be nothing left to keep her alive.

I did not feel this on the same level of course, but I did still feel it. I reached out to my friends more often than they did, and eventually I stopped getting responses. I stopped trying to reach out. I would wait, crying in my room, for someone to send a message. I’d go through my memory box, looking at old letters, inventing a new one in my mind. Moving on was the hardest part, accepting that some friends would go. The narrator hasn’t reached this stage yet. Because moving on is not an option she can accept yet. So she stays in limbo, going with the flow of her new life, waiting for a message to tell her what to do.

I think something that this whole topic illustrates is how much we rely on other people to define ourselves. We need human contact to survive- that is how we are wired. Without real connections to real people, we start to lose our sense of self and our sense of purpose. When we lose connections to people, we focus on the objects we associate with them because we need a connection. We need to hold on to something, in times of joy or struggle. Our past is something we carry with us, and if we leave it behind we are left wondering how we got here and where we should go now.

In the past two years alone, there has been a spike in conservatism in our government that has threatened civil rights, first with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and several bills trying to erase nondiscrimination laws towards the LGBTQ+ community and laws that will limit a transgender person’s right to transition. Amidst these regressions in our democracy are conservative social media stars, coaxing young people into dangerous beliefs.

A recent conservative star has been Andrew Tate, a 36-year old British kick-boxing champion known for his misogynistic takes such as saying women are more attractive when they are 18 and 19, rather than 26 because “they have been through less dick” - or that that female sexual assault victims should “bear some responsibility”. Through being wanted for arrest for sex trafficking young women employed in his webcam business, a new personality has come into light, who some are calling a “female Andrew Tate”. Her name is Hannah Pearl Davis, better known as “Pearl”, and she’s a 26 year-old self proclaimed “anti-feminist”. At first, people thought she was being satirical or was just desperate for attention, but as her following has grown she’s started being taken seriously. After scrolling through her twitter account for just five minutes, I immediately saw a picture she’d posted wearing a shirt saying “Women Shouldn’t Vote” - with twelve and a half million views. Other tweets from her profile in the last few months alone include: “Stop sleeping with fat chicks!!”, “Men like pure women not whores”, and “I’m transphobic. I am in fact afraid of trans people.” With almost two million followers on Youtube, you would think she’d consider the effects her platform may have on young girls and the way they view themselves.

“She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”

Serena Joy, a character from The Handmaid’s Tale, rose to fame in this dystopian novel similar to how Pearl has today. Serena was a christian gospel singer on a network television show and rose to fame preaching christian, conservative values. Offred infers that Serena had some influence on the evolution of Gilead, that she was “taken at her word”, which is why people like Pearl are so terrifying - her words are ridiculous but she may have more influence than we assume. What’s funny is, much like Serena, if Pearl were to be taken at her word and the things she’s claimed to want came true, she would lose all her status. The values she’s capitalized on have the capacity to render her powerless, and that doesn’t seem to scare her.

“We thought she was funny. Or Luke thought she was funny. I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest.”

It’s fun to sit and laugh at Pearl, whose political takes seem so ridiculous that we think she can’t truly believe it. And we know she doesn’t truly believe it, but what we don’t see are the people endorsing her, praising her for making these speeches. These people have the true power to take what Pearl says seriously and make it a reality. We see “Women Shouldn’t Vote!” pasted on her shirt and think of what a joke she must be, but the truth is that there was a time when women couldn’t vote and there is very little reason why, if the wrong people were in power, we couldn’t go back to that time. The Handmaid’s Tale is so horrifying and still so topical today because we know it wouldn’t be impossible for the US to head towards Gilead.