So little of The Handmaid’s Taleis invention, of course. I once saw one on display in a French museum embroidered with the words “Dieu le veut” or “God wills it”. Those bedsheets with a hole in them are no Gilead invention.
Trusting that the Handmaids had been duly subjugated, Gilead was overconfident about its power to win over hearts and minds.įaced with that threat, and urged by June (“Oh, you have to fuck somebody you don’t want to? Poor thing”), Nick went through with it, giving us another entry to add to The Handmaid’s Tale’s list of ‘most toe-curlingly awful sex scenes’. Parading the Handmaids-women the Sons of Jacob had imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and raped-around the sparkling new Red Centre (about which Aunt Lydia had exclaimed delight at the prospect of the increased number of girls they would now be able to ‘process’) to show them off to the other district Commanders, was pride that may have led to Gilead’s fall. And just like Emily before her, she acted. Aunt Lydia’s punishments though, were so unusually brutal that Ofglen turned. As a handmaid, she had stable food and shelter to sweeten the pill of her sexual exploitation. Before it, she’d been a homeless addict forced into sex work.
Before her tongue was removed as punishment for the stoning rebellion, Ofglen was a Gilead fan. That cruelty might have just been its undoing. “Milk it while you can,” Rita told her, both of them knowing that as soon as the baby is born, June will be newly vulnerable to Gilead’s cruelty. The restraints holding each in place were stretched and stretched as a little more freedom, and a little more intimacy was allowed, until June over-stretched and both women pinged right back to their original positions: mistress and servant married woman of faith, and slut.Īs long as June is pregnant though, she has power. Serena and June, Eden and Nick, the Commander and Offred… First Bloodshowed how carefully each pairing had to navigate their relationship with the monster of Gilead breathing down their necks.įor a moment, against every instinct, it seemed possible for Serena and June to reach a kind of sororal affinity. The explosion and its raucous punk-pop epilogue was an audacious ending to a quietly tense episode about the shifting weight of power in the various relationships inside the Waterford home. Take out those few, and who will fill the vacuum? It’s not as though the women who helped to bring about the regime change can take control. It’s a sound strategy Gilead’s power is in the hands of the few.