the gymnasium

The gymnasium is the first space of confinement Offred describes in her narrative, a former high school basketball court repurposed as the dormitory for the Handmaids during their indoctrination at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center. It is a place where the regime's control over bodies, speech, and memory is established through physical layout, surveillance, and ritualized routine, and it becomes the site of both the most intense collective discipline and the most fragile acts of resistance.

Identity and Physical Space

The gymnasium retains the traces of its former life: the floor is of varnished wood with stripes and circles painted on it for the games that were once played there, and the hoops for the basketball nets are still in place, though the nets are gone. A balcony runs around the room for spectators, and Offred imagines she can smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, chewing gum, and perfume from the watching girls. The space is now filled with army cots set up in rows, with spaces between so the Handmaids cannot talk. They have flannelette sheets, like children's, and army-issue blankets, old ones that still say U.S. The lights are turned down but not out, and Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrol with electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts. The guards, specially picked from the Angels, are not allowed inside the building except when called, and the Handmaids are not allowed out except for their walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field, which is enclosed by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

Life and Routine

In the gymnasium, the Handmaids learn to whisper almost without sound, and in the semi-darkness they stretch out their arms, when the Aunts are not looking, to touch each other's hands across space. They learn to lip-read, their heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way they exchange names from bed to bed: Alma, Janine, Dolores, Moira, June. The gymnasium is also the site of the afternoon rest period, between three and four, which the Aunts call a time of rest and meditation. Offred later realizes that this rest was also practice, giving them a chance to get used to blank time. The strange thing is that they needed the rest; many of them went to sleep, tired there a lot of the time, possibly because of some pill or drug put in the food to keep them calm.

Key Actions and Events

It is in the gymnasium that Moira is brought after her first escape attempt, still in her other clothes, jeans and a blue sweatshirt, with a bruise on her left cheek turning purple. The Aunts take her to a vacant bed where the red dress is already laid out, and she undresses and begins to dress again in silence, the Aunts standing at the end of the bed, the rest of the Handmaids watching from inside their slitted eyes. After she is brought back from the hospital, Moira lies on her bed as an example, her feet so swollen they do not look like feet at all but like drowned feet, like lungs. The other Handmaids steal extra paper packets of sugar for her from the cafeteria at mealtimes, smuggling them to her at night, handing them from bed to bed. The story of Moira's escape passes among them that night, in the semidarkness, under their breath, from bed to bed, and the thought of what she would do expands till it fills the room.

Change and Ending

The gymnasium is also where Janine has her breakdown, sitting on the edge of her bed in her white cotton nightgown, her eyes open but not seeing, whispering to herself as if she is a waitress. Moira slaps her across the face to bring her back, telling her she cannot stay there, that she is not there anymore. The gymnasium, then, is not merely a dormitory but a space where the regime's power is both enforced and subverted, where the Handmaids learn to endure and to resist, and where the most extreme examples of discipline and the most fragile acts of solidarity coexist.