Birthing Stool
The Birthing Stool is a central object in Gilead's reproductive ritual, a double-seated wooden device that physically enacts the regime's ideology of childbirth as a collective, hierarchical event. It is not merely a piece of furniture but a stage on which the power relations among Handmaid, Wife, and Commander are performed, transforming a biological process into a state-sanctioned ceremony of ownership and control.
Design and Symbolic Arrangement
The Birthing Stool consists of two seats: a lower one for the Handmaid and a raised, throne-like seat behind and above it for the Wife. When Janine, the Handmaid known as Ofwarren, goes into labor, she sits on the lower seat while the Commander's Wife, the Wife of Warren, scrambles onto the higher seat behind her, her skinny legs coming down on either side of Janine, framing her like the arms of an eccentric chair. This arrangement is meant to signify that the Wife is the true source of the child, with the Handmaid merely a vessel through which the birth passes. The Wife wears a white cotton nightgown and blue fuzzy bedroom slippers, a costume that underscores the domestic and ceremonial nature of the event. The stool is placed in the master bedroom, the domain of the Commander and his Wife, further emphasizing that the birth belongs to the household, not to the Handmaid.
Role in the Birth Ceremony
The Birthing Stool is brought into use only when the labor reaches its final stage. Aunt Elizabeth, who taught Gyn Ed at the Red Center, stands at Janine's feet, directing the process. The stool is set up with blankets, a small tub for bathing the newborn, and a bowl of ice for Janine to suck. The room is dimmed to twilight, and the Handmaids, kneeling on the rug, chant in unison: "Push, push, push" and "Relax. Pant. Push, push, push." The stool becomes the focal point of the collective effort, as the women grip each other's hands and feel the contractions as if they were their own. When the baby crowns, Aunt Elizabeth kneels with an outspread towel to catch it, and the stool is the site of the climactic moment: the head emerges, purple and smeared with fluid, and the child slithers out into the waiting hands of the attendants.
The Wife's Position and Authority
The Wife's seat on the Birthing Stool is not merely symbolic but functional within the regime's logic. She is placed behind and above the Handmaid so that the baby appears to be born into her lap, reinforcing the fiction that the child is hers. After the birth, the Wife is helped down from the stool and laid on the bed, where the washed baby is placed ceremoniously in her arms. The Wives from downstairs crowd in, cooing and congratulating, and it is the Wife who names the child—in this case, Angela. The Handmaid, Janine, is left on the lower seat, crying helplessly, her role completed. The stool thus literalizes the erasure of the Handmaid's motherhood, making her a temporary, disposable container for the child that will belong to the Wife.
Narrative and Thematic Significance
The Birthing Stool is one of the most potent symbols in Offred's narrative of how Gilead reduces women to their reproductive functions. It is a piece of furniture that has been repurposed from a practical aid into an instrument of ideology, much like the red dress and white wings. The stool's design—two seats, one above the other—mirrors the hierarchy of women in Gilead: the Wife, though infertile, is elevated and in control; the Handmaid, though fertile, is subordinated and used. The stool also embodies the regime's claim that childbirth is a communal, not individual, act, and that the child belongs to the state and its elite, not to the woman who bears it. Offred's description of the stool, with its clinical detail and emotional detachment, reflects her own internalization of this system even as she resists it. The stool is a reminder that in Gilead, even the most intimate human experience is staged, regulated, and owned.
