Blue Cloak

The Blue Cloak is a light blue, hooded garment belonging to Serena Joy, appropriated by the Commander to disguise Offred as a Wife during their clandestine visit to the club known as Jezebel's. The cloak's color—the prescribed hue for Commanders' Wives—is its essential feature: it signals a social rank that Offred does not hold, allowing her to pass through checkpoints where a Handmaid in red would be scrutinized. The Commander instructs Offred to pull the hood down over her face and try not to smear the makeup she has applied, warning her that the disguise is "for getting through the checkpoints." He also provides a forged pass, completing the illusion of a Wife traveling with her husband. The cloak thus functions as a portable fiction, a costume that momentarily lifts Offred out of her prescribed identity and into a realm of forbidden mobility.

The Commander's Power and the Cloak as Instrument

The Commander's casual appropriation of Serena Joy's cloak reveals the asymmetry of power within the household. He takes the garment from storage, knowing his wife "wouldn't notice" its absence, and later uses it without her knowledge or consent. This act demonstrates that even the personal property of a Wife is subject to a Commander's will. For Offred, wearing the cloak is an experience of both liberation and acute vulnerability. Inside the car, she must flatten herself on the floor to pass through a gateway where Wives are not allowed, the cloak stifling and smelling of mothballs. The garment is a tool of the Commander's whim, a prop in his "juvenile display" of mastery, as he shows her off to other men at the club. Yet it also gives Offred a taste of relative freedom: without the white wings that normally restrict her vision, her head feels "curiously light."

The Cloak as Evidence and the Unraveling of Secrecy

The Blue Cloak becomes the material evidence that destroys Offred's secret. After the visit to Jezebel's, Serena Joy discovers lipstick on the cloak—a trace of Offred's transformation that the Commander failed to erase. Confronting Offred on the front steps, Serena Joy holds up the cloak and throws it down, along with the purple sequined costume Offred wore underneath. "There was lipstick on it," she says. "How could you be so vulgar? I told him... Behind my back." The cloak, once a means of concealment, becomes the object that exposes Offred's transgression and shatters whatever fragile arrangement existed between the three of them. Serena Joy's accusation—"You could have left me something"—reveals that the cloak's violation is not merely a breach of rules but a personal betrayal, a theft of the little she believed was hers.

The Cloak's Narrative Significance

The Blue Cloak operates as a powerful narrative device that crystallizes the novel's themes of disguise, surveillance, and the precariousness of identity under a totalitarian regime. It is a garment that allows Offred to briefly inhabit another social role, yet its borrowed nature means that the freedom it offers is always contingent on the Commander's protection and Serena Joy's ignorance. When the cloak is discovered, the illusion collapses, and Offred is left exposed, her fate uncertain. The cloak thus embodies the central paradox of Offred's existence: the only avenues of escape or agency available to her are those that deepen her complicity with the very system that oppresses her, and every act of resistance leaves a trace that can be used against her.