Butter
Butter is one of the few luxuries still available to the Handmaids of Gilead, yet it is not a luxury they are meant to enjoy. In a regime that has outlawed hand lotion and face cream as vanities, decreeing that only the insides of a woman's body matter and that the outside may become hard and wrinkled like the shell of a nut, butter becomes a covert resource. The Handmaids hoard it, hide it, and use it to keep their skin soft, a practice that is at once a small act of rebellion and a desperate form of hope.
A Secret Ceremony of Self-Preservation
Offred learns the trick of using butter as a skin treatment at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, the Red Center, where the practice is passed among the women in secret. She saves pats of butter from her meals, wrapping them in paper napkins and hiding them in the toe of her right shoe. After the Ceremony, when she returns to her room, she retrieves the butter, which has often gone semi-liquid in the warmth of the cupboard, and rubs it over her face and into the skin of her hands. The butter is greasy and will go rancid, making her smell like old cheese, but she does it anyway. "As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft," she reflects, "we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones." This ritual is a quiet, daily act of defiance against the Wives' decree that the Handmaids should not look attractive, and it serves as a tangible link to a humanity the regime seeks to deny them.
A Bargaining Chip and a Measure of Power
Butter also enters the clandestine economy of the Commander's household. When Offred asks the Commander for hand lotion, he is initially puzzled by the request, musing that using butter is "very clever." He laughs at the ingenuity, a reaction that Offred finds infuriating. The exchange reveals the vast gulf between their experiences: the Commander, who can procure almost anything, is amused by the resourcefulness of a woman who must resort to kitchen fat to care for her own skin. Offred's request for hand lotion is a small but significant negotiation within their illicit relationship, a moment where she dares to ask for something that acknowledges her body's needs beyond its reproductive function. The butter, in this context, becomes a measure of the Commander's ignorance of the real conditions under which the Handmaids live, and a token of the small, humiliating transactions that define their unequal bond.
A Link to the Past and a Promise of the Future
The use of butter is also a practice shared with the unknown woman who preceded Offred in her room, the one who scratched "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" on the wall of the closet. Offred imagines that this woman, whom she pictures as having freckles and a good laugh, must have done the same thing, buttering her skin to keep it soft. This imagined connection creates a silent sisterhood, a chain of women who have used the same humble substance to preserve a sense of self and a belief in a future beyond the walls of their rooms. The butter, then, is more than a cosmetic substitute; it is a material link to the past, a shared secret, and a fragile promise that the desire for touch and love will not be extinguished. It is, as Offred says, one of the "devices" to which they have descended, a small, greasy, and rancid-smelling emblem of their enduring humanity.
