Garden Shears

The Garden Shears are a tool of Serena Joy's gardening, used to cut the seedpods from the tulips after they have bloomed. Offred observes Serena Joy kneeling on a cushion in the garden, her cane beside her on the grass, aiming and positioning the blades of the shears before cutting with a convulsive jerk of her hands. This act is performed with a force that suggests something beyond mere horticulture, as if Serena Joy is committing a blitzkrieg or kamikaze on the swelling genitalia of the flowers, cutting off the fruiting body to make the bulb store energy. Offred interprets this as Saint Serena doing penance on her knees.

Offred's Covetousness

Offred does not merely observe the shears; she covets them. The shears represent a tangible object of power and potential violence in a world where she is denied both. The thought of possessing them is a small, mean-minded, bitter joke she makes about Serena Joy, but the desire is real and specific. Offred's longing for the shears is a longing for a weapon, a tool that could be used to cut, to harm, to escape, or to end her own life. The shears are a concrete symbol of the agency she has been stripped of, and her desire for them is a measure of her desperation.

Narrative Significance

The Garden Shears function as a potent symbol of the limited and dangerous forms of power available to women within Gilead. Serena Joy uses them to assert control over the natural world, to enforce a kind of sterile order on her garden, while Offred sees in them the potential for a more direct and violent form of agency. The shears are a reminder that even the most mundane objects can become charged with meaning and desire in a world of extreme constraint. They are a small, sharp point of possibility in an otherwise flat and hopeless landscape.