Bodily Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale
In this essay I will explore how women’s bodies are portrayed in Margret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Women in Gilead are oppressed in many different ways, the most significant being physical enslavement of the handmaids. Their bodies are being colonized by the society that they are now forced to inhabit and serve, as they are now in charge of continuing the population. Offred transforms her body into a site of resistance despite the bodily domination she faces by the men in Gilead. Throughout this paper, I will aim to prove that despite extreme injustice directed towards women’s bodies, Offred is able to tap into an inner strength within her body that allows her to defy the patriarchal forces that seek to keep her physically oppressed. I will do this by first illustrating the bodily oppression the handmaid's experience and then show how through embracing her body’s sexuality in her affair with the Commander and Nick, alongside being willing to commit suicde; Offred is able to gain sovereignty over her body once again.
A pillar of Gileadean society is men having dominion over women and their bodies. This concept of men ‘owning’ women or women being represented as property is nothing new and can be traced to the 17th century; however, this depiction of women has been going on since the beginning of time. Patrica Crawford describes how during medieval times “marital status affected women's legal position...a husband and wife became one person and that person was the husband” ( Crawford 153) meaning that “”legally no wife owned her own body” ( Crawford 159). This completely eliminates any autonomy both legally and internally as women are no longer considered an individual human but simply an extension of man. The anonymous founders of Gilead, by turning towards fanatic Christianity in hopes to recapture these dated and medieval possession of women. As Beatrix Kiss, a professor at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, notes that while the most well known form of bodily oppression in Gilead is the forced surrogacy of the handmaids. Yet Kiss points out that this physical oppression could not have been implemented overnight, which Offred affirms as she reflects upon her first hours at the Red Center, she alongside the other handmaids believed that “something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy” (Atwood 4). As Gileadean society was in the process of constructing itself, reproductive women that were taken to become a twisted form of sex slave known as handmaids still believed that they would retain a form bodily autonomy. While Offred describes this as a fantasy alluding that the women in the Red Center realized their thoughts of physical and political freedom was merely a fantasy told to keep morale high. Kiss notes the deeper patriarchal forces that were behind the physical oppression of fertile women (and women in general). She illustrates how it is:
undeniable that the Commanders’ plan was not just to save society from extinction but also to recreate a covertly a strong patriarchy where women are dependent on men. This was achieved by taking natural differences of female and male bodies, strongly foregrounding these, and erecting an impenetrable wall between genders… (Kiss 59)
On the surface level it appears that those in charge of Gileadean society are concerned about the decline in birth rate which threatens humanity; however, upon deeper inspection it is evident that the Commanders true intent is to once more make women an extension of man--not to be seen as individual humans with rights of their own, thus furthering their patriarchal agenda.
The ways that the women, mainly handmaids, are physically suppressed and taken advantage of in Gilead is both overt and covert. One of the most obvious signs of bodily oppression is the infamous red cloak and white wings that the handmaids are required to wear which is a stark contrast to the Wives blue and the Marthas green. While reflecting on her prescribed outfit Offred describes how “everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us” (Atwood 8). Immediately women and their bodies, simply due to the color clothes that they wear, are associated with violence, life, passion and sexuality. Pamala Cooper who is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina in her article ‘“A Body Story with a Vengeance’: Anatomy and Struggle in the Bell Jar and the Handmaid's Tale” notes how “in the repertoire of physical functions blood marks both the site of the wound where life ebbs away, and the viability of the uterus where life declares itself” ( Cooper 93). By forcing handmaids to dress in a particular fashion the handmaids are automatically seen as identical objects that serve one purpose: to continue the population. While responsible for the production of life, Gilead has forced the handmaids to surrender their own bodily existence in order to achieve the balance of power that they desire. Offred continues to describe her outfit saying, “The skirt is ankle length, full, gathered to a flat yoke that extends over the breast...The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen” (Atwood 8). The notorious white wings serve a dual use of bodily oppression as it blocks the women’s oppression keeping them from seeing and participating in the world while also keeping them from being seen as people in the society. This lack of sight allows for the Commanders, Aunts, and Wives to commodify the handmaids and view them and their bodies as objects to be used and discarded whenever they wish.
The most significant form of bodily oppression that the handmaids experience is during the ceremony in which the handmaids are forced to have sex with their assigned Commanders. Even before the sexual aspect of the ceremony begins it is clear through the designated bodily behavior that the handmaid is the lowest caste. Offred is very intentional with her physical behavior as soon as she enters Serena Joy’s sitting room. She describes how she enters the room and doesn’t “sit, but take my place, kneeling near the chair with the footstool where Serena Joy will shortly enthrone herself…” (Atwood 79). Offred is kneeling at the footstool of Serena Joy like a Catholic kneels before a Saint in prayer. This picture of this nonverbal behavior illustrates that the handmaids are in a servitle position to both the Wife and Commander. Christina Clark discusses the gendered notion of kneeling in her article “Woman, Gender, and Religion” stating that “kneeling is above all a sign of submission, appropriate for girls and women, inappropriate in most cases for men” (Clark 15). Kneeling has historically been seen as a sign of submission. It is a position for the meek, the defeated, the bereaved, and the passive. The gendered association with kneeling demonstrates the patriarchal belief that women are below men both physically and socially. The patriarchal oppression of the handmaid’s bodies only becomes more aggressive as the ceremony progresses. Offred describes how she lies on her back her:
red skirt is hitched up to [her] waist, though no higher. Below is the Commander fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because that is not what he is doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. (Atwood 94)
The posture that is required from the handmaids during the ceremony portrays that they are in an inactive role. Offred even notes that she is not participating in the sexual act that is being performed but like a sex doll is simply absorbing the sexual act that is taking place. This lack of participation shows that the women in Gilead are viewed as objects that are not meant to have a sexual identity let alone a personal identity that extends outside the domestic sphere. Authors Zahra Sadeghi and Narges Mirzapour point out how Gilead treats women like property and through the Ceremony colonize them by utilizing “the totalitarian theocracy to subjugate women and use their bodies as political instruments which can produce a future generation” (Sadeghi and Mirzapour). This will help create a new society in which an entire future generation of women will be living under this suppressive patriarchal regime--never to be viewed as complete individual unless they are tied to a man as wife, daughter, or in Gilead handmaid.
Even though her body is being monopolized and oppressed in many different ways by Gilead, Offred is still able to find strength by forming her own relationship with her body and ultimately her body into a tool of resistance (against the regime that wishes to hold her hostage/suppress her). The more bodily injustice that Offred faces, the more she internalizes her anger which she expresses through her sexuality. On her trip to the market with Ofglen, Offred notes how the Guardians drink in the sight of her as they are no longer permitted to touch women. Frustrated by being unable to escape the oppressive male gaze she decides to “move [her] hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like...teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach...I find I am not ashamed...I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.” (Atwood 22). Despite feeling initially as if she is a victim of voyeurism, Offred is able to channel her sexuality via her body and use it as a tool to fight the very regime that seeks to take her autonomy away from her. This momentum that Offred experiences grows as she begins an affair with the Commander. At the end of their first meeting the Commander requests a kiss before allowing Offred to leave the room. Before she responds, Offred fantasizes how she could “approach the Commander, to kiss him, here alone, and take off his jacket as if to allow or invite something further...and slip the lever out from the sleeve and drive the sharp end into him” (Atwood 139). While initially it seems like the Commander is the driving sexual force behind this interaction, Offred soon recognizes the power that she actually holds within this scenario. Simply by realizing that her body is an object of desire, Offred realizes that she can regain power over her body. She continues describing how the Commander’s blood would come out “hot as soup, sexual, over my hands” (Atwood 140). The mere fantasy of using her body as a tool of resistance reinstates in Offred that she possesses sexual dominance. Furthermore, it becomes clear that Offred, not unlike the Commander and those alongside him, finds arousal in being able to use her body as a weapon against her oppressors.
As her affair with the commander progresses, Offred experiences more bodily autonomy that she is able to use as a tool defiance towards the oppressive Gileadian regime. Upon their third night of meeting Offred “asked him for some hand lotion. I didn’t want to sound begging, but I wanted what I could get” (Atwood 158). Though a small request, asking for body lotion is one way for Offred to distinguish her body from being a reproductive tool to being seen as a human woman who is being abused. Authors Caroline Ramazanoglu and Janet Holland in their book Up Against Foucault state that if women desire “to gain control their own bodies--for example, within reference to contraception, reproduction, or sexual pleasure--then they must struggle to empower themselves transforming specific and local relationships which shore up men’s power” (Holland and Ramazanoglu 240). Women whose relationship with their bodies is predefined by an oppressive patriarchal culture, like the handmaids, have to reconstruct how their bodies are perceived on both a small and global level. This is what Offred ends up doing as her affair with the Commander becomes more involved. Offred is determined to do this by remaining in control of her interactions with the Commander, even though she realizes that he has more power than her. She plans on “not giving anything away: selling only” (Atwood 138) even if what she is selling is her body as sexual illusion. Offred realizes that she has the power to manipulate “this desire of his. It could be important, it could be a passport” (Atwood 144). How Offred chooses to present her body to the Commander during their illicit moments together could literally determine her freedom from her current oppressive state. Offred uses her body to influence and exploit those who are trying to take away her bodily freedom by turning her into a source for reproduction. As Maryam Kouhestani a PhD student in English literature at the University of Malaya, Malaysia points out “the Handmaids’ bodies, furthermore, turn into one body…[Gilead] view[s] the female body as a body of production” (Kouhestani 611). Before her affair with the Commander, both Offred (as taught via ideology) and the Commander viewed her body as a production site, void of personhood or identity. However, through simple acts such as body language, Offred is able to humanize herself to the Commander. She describes how she “no longer sit[s] stiff-necked, straight-backed” but how “instead my body’s lax, cozy even. My red shoes are off, my legs are tucked up underneath me on the chair, surrounded by a buttress of red skirt” (Atwood 183). Nonverbally, Offred is stating to the Commander that she is comfortable around him, her lack of shoes and vulnerable seating position even suggest that she trusts him to a degree. The Commander’s change in perception is vital to Offred being able to turn the scales of power in her favor. After Offred learns the true meaning behind her manta nolite te bastardes carborundorum and the responsibility the Commander feels over the suicide of his previous handmaid she is finaly able to exploit the Commander. She thinks to herself “What I have on him is the possibility of my own death. What I have on him is his own guilt. At last” (emphasis added Atwood 188). The Commander has been caught in his own sticky web. Though he acts to care and desire Offred and her body he would allow her to die because to save his face and position. Armed with this information Offred is able to flip the positions of power as she now can use her body in two ways to control the Commander: through her sexuality and through the threat of her death.
Offred’s affair with the Commander isn’t the only affair that she has during her time as a handmaid. She also has a torrid and passionate affair with the Commander’s driver Nick. Throughout this relationship Offred experiences a different form of bodily empowerment than she did with the Commander, one that is more liberating than she felt with him. Offred’s attraction to Nick is evident from the beginning of the novel. When reflecting on this innate tension she feels with him, Offred mentions how despite herself “I think of how he might smell...tanned skin, moist in the sun, filmed with smoke. I sigh, inhaling” (Atwood 18). As a handmaid, Offred is supposed to lack any form of individuality and sexuality, yet it is clear that in the presence of Nick Offred becomes aware of her body’s sexual desires. Furthemore, she becomes aware of the spiritual needs of her body and soul as this awakening allows her to view herself as an independent once again. Feminist scholar, Audre Lorde discusses the power of eroticity in her book Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches “when I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming...our lives” (Lorde 89). Lust for women goes beyond raw bodily desire and turns into a feminine sovereignty--untouched by men. This knowledge that women can please themselves and exist wholly outside of the patriarchy is empowering. Lorde goes as far as calling it dangerous considering that it is a threat to men’s power. This emancipating feeling is one reason that Thirunavukkarasu and Saravanan believe that Offred “ultimately takes a series of tremendous risks to continue her affair with Nick” and that in doing so “she demonstrates the power of sexual acts” ( Thirunavukkarasu and Saravanan). A power that the Gilead regime doesn’t want any women to have, let alone a handmaid who isn’t supposed to be seen as fully woman or fully human. Offred’s willingness to acknowledge her bodily desires and the extension of self that comes with them in itself is an act of resistance, because it shows that she is unable to be fully penetrated by the patriarchy’s sexist ideology.
Before Offred and Nick’s affair is even physical, Offred is actively defying the culture that seeks to oppress her. As her attraction and interest in him grows, she willingly takes more and more risks to indulge herself. One night towards the end of the novel, Offred goes to Nick’s apartment above the garage and throws her body at him. The event is fuzzily depicted. Offred recounts how “He’s undoing my dress...I can’t see his face and I can hardly breathe...His mouth is on me, his hands, I can’t wait and he’s moving...I’m alive in my skin again” (emphasis added Atwood 261). The connection that Offred makes with Nick during this sexual encounter revives her. It is the touching, the combining of two bodies that hunger for one another that causes her to come into her own flesh. She sees herself through a lover's eyes: as desirable, as an individual--only her body and her unique persona will satisfy his hunger. Morten Magi Raven, a student at the University of Tartu, writes in their theis “Fundamentalism and Male-Femlae Relationships In Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” points out that with Nick it is “Offred’s own desire to see him [that] drives the relationship and that pursuing the relationship, perhaps more importantly, is a choice that she makes” (Ravn 26) It is Offred’s agency behind her desire that is the driving force behind her relationship with Nick. The illicit, illegal affair is a blatant act of protest against the Gilead regime as clearly Offred believes that she is worthy of sexual pleasure be it superficial or meaningful--in short she believes that she has the right to choose how to use her body and who should have access to it. She discusses this new found feeling of power stating “I can recognize this admission as a kind of boasting. There’s pride in it, because it demonstrates how extreme and therefore justified it [the affair] was, for me” (Atwood 271). Through her affair with Nick she is able to become her own ‘lover’. By giving her body what it wants, she is able to untether herself from the collective body of handmaids and create bodily, political, and spiritual autonomy for herself.
Perhaps the most powerful way that Offred uses her body as a tool of resistance is by threatening to kill herself. Initially, dark suicidal ideations might be read as cowardly--that she would rather die than fight for her life. However there is another reading that must be considered. Offred often mentions suicide throughout the novel. Yet Offred points out that “their power had a flaw to it...the audacity was what we liked” (Atwood 133). Death is the flaw, more specifically, self-inflicted death and injury. The handmaids are the only women in Gilead that are able to have children if they mutilate themselves or go as far as to kill themselves not only with the cacuasion race cease to exist but the Gilead regime will have failed. Offred discusses incidents where previous handmaids have turned towards this form of escape. On bath day she is quick to point out that “the door has no lock and there are no razors, of course. There were incidents in bathrooms at first: there were cuttings, downings. Before they got all the bugs ironed out” (Atwood 62). Jamie Dopp describes the totalitarian governments largest fear related to suicide. Using Ofglen’s suicide as an example she notes how “her suicided protect[ed] her fellow comrades” furthermore the regime fears that a defiant act such as this could cause “anger or sympathy in other handmaids” which encouages and “highlights others to engage in risky action against them” (Dopp 93). If the handmaids incite a revolution via suicde, not only could this threaten the population but an act of rebellion such as this encourages women, handmaids, martha, and wives alike to stand up against the oppressive patriarchal government and united they could have the power to overthrow it. Towards the end of the novel, as Offred fears that her life is in danger, she once more turns to sucide. Many once again see this as an admittance of defeat as it seems that she is not willing to fight for her life. However it is important to pay attention to how Offred describes her death. She states “I should have taken things into my own hand…I should have stolen a knife from the kitchen, found some way to the sewing scissors. There were the gardening sears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you’re looking for them” (Atwood 293). The rhetoric behind this statement is not that of a woman that has given up, who no longer has any hope. To Offred taking her life, is restoring her life, taking her power back that Gilead stole from her. Throughout the whole novel she has been looking for weapons that though she would use on her own body, would also be a weapon against the regime. Her physical body through death would turn into a weapon as it would declare you don’t have ownership over me. As Patricia Stapleton further discusses this her article “Suicide as Apocolypse in The Handmaid’s Tale” for Offred “suicide is also a way for [her] to take control of the narrative and her own body again. The ultimate act of killing herself is a revelation; it allows Offred the power to stop her story when she--and no one else--has decided” (Stapelton 28). Contemplating her suicide is Offred’s ultiment act of resistance becuase it shows her dedication in standing up and resisting those who seek to keep her oppressed. She is willing to physically take her life if it means that she has control over her body. She makes that choice. That is true empowerment.
Women’s bodies are portrayed differently throughout The Handmaid’s Tale. Most positive associations are either from the past or rooted in Gilead’s twisted ideology which really seeks to oppress women. Otherwise it becomes clear through reading the novel that women are seen as one body to be used in whatever way best services man. However, Atwood illustrates that the body holds power and that it can be a site of resistance. Any ounce of bodily autonomy or sexuality felt by a handmaid can be turned into an act of rebellion internally and externally. We see this in Offred as she uses her body in manipulative ways through her affair with the Commander, as she liberates herself during her affair with Nick, and that she is willing to kill herself in order to have autonomy over her own body. Ironically it is in the very part of Offred that the regime of Gilead is trying to control that Offred is able to find her freedom. It keeps her from being passive throughout the novel and allows her to play a subtle but active role in a rebellion against the patriarchal government alongside the organized rebellion. It is her relationship with her body that causes Offred to grow in strength and confidence as a character which ultimately leads to her escape.
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