The Handmaid's Tale

Offred and Ofglen visit the Wall again. A priest hangs there along with two men wearing placards accusing them of “Gender Treachery” (53), or homosexuality. On the way home from the wall, Ofglen remarks, “It’s a beautiful May day,” and Offred thinks, “Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago” (53).

They watch a funeral procession of poor “Econowives,” or wives of lower-ranking men. One carries a jar so small that it must contain miscarried remains of a fetus only two or three months old and too small to know if “it was an Unbaby,” a child born with a deformity or birth defect (54).

When Offred returns, Nick asks, “Nice walk?” (55), a dangerous rejection of protocol, and Offred remembers “Aunt Lydia” telling her that men are easily tempted because “God made them that way” so “it’s up to you to set the boundaries” (55). As she passes Serena Joy, she recalls how the woman went from gospel singing to making speeches “about the sanctity of the home” (55). Offred’s husband, Luke, had found her funny, but Offred “only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest” (56).

Upstairs, Offred is shocked to see the Commander “near the door to the room where I stay” (59). She does not understand why he is “violating custom” (59) or what significance it holds. She wonders if he was “in my room” and realizes that she“ called it mine” (59).

Concluding that it is “MY room, then” (60), she remembers exploring it when she first moved in, taking it section by section over several days to pass the time. On the third day, she explored the cupboard and found the words “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” scratched into the floor in “tiny writing” (62). She does not know what the words mean but realizes that another Handmaid must have lived there before her.

Offred imagines the woman being like “Moira as she was when she was in college […] quirky, jaunty, athletic […] Freckles, I think; irreverent, resourceful” (62). She remembers asking Rita about the previous Handmaid, but Rita would only say, “She didn’t work out” (63).

Offred recalls Aunt Lydia “training” the Handmaids, condemning women of the past for sunbathing or walking around scantily-clad and concluding, “[N]o wonder those things used to happen” (65). She remembers Moira talking about “giving an underwhore party […] like Tupperware, only with underwear” and wonders “[i]s that how we lived then?” (66).

Thinking about how Gilead came about, she realizes that “we lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it” and observes that “[n]othing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it” (66). From her window, she watches the Commander get out of his car and thinks, “I ought to feel hatred for this man […] but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love” (68).

Offred goes to the doctor for obligatory tests: “urine, hormones, cancer smear, blood test” (69). There, she takes off her clothes and covers herself with a sheet. Another sheet hangs from the ceiling level with her neck and “intersects me so that the doctor will never see my face. He deals with a torso only” (70).

The doctor is unorthodoxly talkative and says he can “help” (70) Offred by having sex with her, in order to get her pregnant, as many of the Commanders are sterile. Offred is shocked that “he’s said a forbidden word. Sterile” and notes that “[t]here is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law” (70-71).

The doctor says that he “hate[s] to see what they put you through,” and Offred recognizes “genuine sympathy” but that he is also “enjoying this, sympathy and all” (71). Offred declines but is careful to be polite because the doctor “could fake the tests, report me for cancer, for infertility, have me shipped off to the Colonies with the Unwomen,” or those who do not submit to Gilead’s oppressive social structures (71).

The bathroom in the Commander’s house has “an oblong of tin,” instead of a glass mirror, and no razors, because “[t]here were incidents in bathrooms at first; there were cuttings, drownings” (72). Undressing, Offred avoids “looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because […] I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely” (73).

In the bath, she thinks of her daughter and considers that “they were right, it’s easier, to think of her as dead” (74). Afterward, Cora, a Martha, brings her a supper of “bland” and “healthy” food (75), and Offred takes a pat of butter, wraps it in a napkin, and places it “into the toe of my right shoe” (76).