There were other ways that Gilead stripped the identities of its women. That was especially true for the handmaid, who faced numerous rules and restrictions. The most obvious was their outfits, which were specifically designed to impede their vision. To encourage conformity, some handmaids were physically mutilated.
That includes Janine, who had an eye removed following a rebellious streak and using forbidden language. After a miraculous escape to Canada, June Osborne restarted her life, this time using her real name. Aunts are understood to be of the highest status for a working female in Gilead. Responsibilities include maintaining training, discipline and health, which includes everything from brutal branding rituals to regulating the diets of pregnant handmaids. Though not as respected as the Wives, the Aunts pull rank when it comes to the health and well-being of the pregnant handmaids and children of Gilead.
Given the importance of their task, they are allowed to do something forbidden to all other women: read. These women can become handmaids for the sins of their husbands as seen in season 2, episode 4. Eden, a year-old who was assigned to marry Waterford driver Nick Blane Max Minghella in the second season, was the first Econowife we were exposed to who grew up truly believing the teachings of Gilead.
The young bride, played by Sydney Sweeney, presented herself as a loyal follower of God who understood her sole purpose is to bring children into the society.
Her eventual transgressions infidelity lead to her execution. Her death proves even fertile young women are not protected from the violent consequences Gilead boasts. These are the lowest ranking females in Gilead, forced to live out their dying days working in the Colonies, aka fields poisoned with toxic chemicals.
If not executed by hanging, women of any rank who disobey — even the Wives — will work until their skin peels off and poison eventually overtakes them. What qualifies as a sin worthy of a life in the Colonies is completely subjective. Tears pour out of her eyes, and yet, she writes, a third eye in her forehead regards the situation, as cold as a stone.
She puts it on, picks up a gun, and passes the test. Was I proud of what we managed to accomplish, despite the limitations?
Also, on some level, yes. But her story functions as a parable: the tale of a woman who, in trying to save herself, erects the regime that ruins her. No one but Aunt Lydia, who has been weaving a network of strings to be pulled at her pleasure, could undermine Gilead so effectively. Still, her actions are not presented as redemptive. On the show, the couple who imprison Offred as their Handmaid, Commander Waterford and his wife, Serena, are played by attractive actors in their forties and thirties, respectively.
Precisely who is being addressed is a crucial and carefully considered matter in the novel. Our job is not to censure but to understand. It is now an idea that is asked to support and transubstantiate the weight of our time. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true. Agnes has a secret identity, which viewers of the TV show will grasp right away. The same is true for the other narrator. She is called Daisy when she is in Canada and goes by Jade after she is smuggled into Gilead, but her real name is suggested early on in her portion of the narrative, when she rants about Baby Nicole, the child of a Handmaid and a Commander who became a national figure after her mother smuggled her into Canada and disappeared.
Aunt Lydia has Gilead wired; she knows how to get Baby Nicole back into the country, and she knows how to get her out again. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to. We were all so busy imagining ourselves as Handmaids that we failed to see that we might be Aunts—that we, too, might feel, at the culmination of a disaster we created through our own pragmatic indifference, that we had no real choice, that we were just aiming for survival, that we were doing what anyone would do.
Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real. By Rebecca Mead.
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