the church
The church is a small, centuries-old building, one of the first erected in the city, and under Gilead it is no longer used for worship but has been converted into a museum. Admission is free, and inside one can see paintings of women in long somber dresses with their hair covered by white caps, and of upright, darkly clothed, unsmiling men—figures presented as "our ancestors." The regime has left the church and its gravestones untouched, intervening only with "the more recent history that offends them." This preservation makes the church a rare pocket of the pre-Gilead past that has not been erased or repurposed, though its function has been hollowed out into a static exhibit.
A Landmark on the Daily Route
The church is a fixed point on the shopping walks that Handmaids undertake in pairs. Ofglen, the narrator's partner, routinely asks to pass by it, saying "I'd like to pass by the church" as if piously, though the narrator knows "what she's really after" is the Wall that stands beside it. The churchyard contains old gravestones that are weathered and eroding, decorated with skulls and crossed bones, memento mori, dough-faced angels, and winged hourglasses "to remind us of the passing of mortal time," as well as urns and willow trees from a later century for mourning. Ofglen bows her head as if praying each time they stop there, and the narrator wonders whether she is mourning "someone in particular gone"—a man or a child—or merely performing piety for show. The narrator recognizes that she herself must look the same to Ofglen: "How can it be otherwise?"
The Wall and the Hanged Bodies
After pausing at the church, the two women turn their backs on it and face the thing they have in truth come to see: the Wall. This Wall is also hundreds of years old, made of red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now it is fitted with ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts, barbed wire along the bottom, and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through its gates willingly; the precautions are for those trying to get out, though making it even as far as the Wall from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway, bodies hang by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. The hooks set into the brickwork for this purpose look like "appliances for the armless" or "steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." The bags over the heads are the worst, making the men like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted, or scarecrows meant to scare. On one bag, blood has seeped through the white cloth where the mouth must have been, making "another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children." The men wear white coats like those worn by doctors or scientists, and each has a placard hung around his neck with a drawing of a human fetus, marking them as doctors who performed abortions in the time before, now executed retroactively for crimes that were legal at the time. The narrator feels not hatred or scorn toward these bodies but blankness, and partly relief because none of them is Luke.
The Church as a Site of Memory and Surveillance
The church functions as a space where the past is both preserved and neutralized. The old gravestones with their inscriptions—including one with an anchor, an hourglass, and the words "In Hope"—offer a silent commentary on mortality that the regime has not bothered to suppress. The narrator reflects on the meaning of "In Hope" above a dead person, wondering whether it was the corpse hoping or those still alive. The church also serves as a place where the Handmaids can pause without arousing suspicion, since their bowed heads and silent postures can be interpreted as prayer. Yet this pause is always followed by the confrontation with the Wall, making the church an antechamber to the regime's most visible display of terror. The narrator notes that the church is "only the more recent history that offends" the regime, implying that the older history represented by the church and its graveyard is considered safe—a sanitized past that poses no threat to Gilead's narrative.
