Handmaid

The Handmaid is the central female role in the Republic of Gilead, a woman reduced to her reproductive function and assigned to the household of a Commander for the purpose of bearing a child. Stripped of her name, her past, and her legal personhood, she is defined by her red dress and white wings, a walking womb whose body has become a national resource. The term 'Handmaid' designates not an individual but a function, a category of women who have been deemed fertile and are forced to serve as surrogate mothers for the ruling elite, their existence a living enactment of the regime's foundational text: 'Give me children, or else I die.'

Identity and Appearance

The Handmaid's uniform is a deliberate instrument of erasure and control. She wears a long red dress, ankle-length and full, gathered to a flat yoke that extends over the breasts, with full sleeves. The color of blood, as Offred notes, 'defines us.' Over her face she wears white wings, stiff blinkers that keep her from seeing fully but also from being seen. The red gloves and flat-heeled red shoes complete the outfit. Everything except the wings around her face is red. The uniform is prescribed issue, government property, and it marks her as a vessel for the state's reproductive project. The white wings are designed to prevent eye contact and to fragment her vision, forcing her to see the world 'in gasps.' The dress is not her own; she refuses to call the room she sleeps in 'my' room. Her body itself is marked: a small tattoo on her ankle, four digits and an eye, functions as 'a passport in reverse,' guaranteeing she can never fade into another landscape. She is too important, too scarce, for that. She is a national resource.

Function and Daily Life

The Handmaid's sole purpose is to bear a child for the Commander and his Wife. She is subjected to monthly medical exams—urine, hormone, cancer smear, blood tests—to monitor her fertility. The Ceremony, a ritualized monthly copulation, takes place in the Wife's bedroom with the Wife present, her legs apart, the Handmaid lying between them, her head on the Wife's stomach. The Commander performs the act while the Wife holds the Handmaid's hands, a gesture meant to signify they are 'one flesh' but which in reality asserts the Wife's control. Kissing is forbidden between the Handmaid and the Commander. Afterward, she is supposed to rest for ten minutes with her feet on a pillow to improve the chances of conception. Her daily life is regulated by bells, measured out in shopping trips, walks in pairs, and prescribed periods of rest. She is not allowed alcohol, coffee, or cigarettes. She is not allowed to read or write. The Bible is kept locked up, read to her by the Commander but never placed in her hands. She is fed bland, healthy food, and her body is treated as a container whose outside can become hard and wrinkled—the Wives have decreed that hand lotion and face cream are vanities, so the Handmaids use butter to keep their skin soft, a private ceremony that allows them to believe they will someday be touched again in love or desire.

Naming and Erasure

The Handmaid's name is a patronymic, composed of the possessive preposition 'Of' and the first name of the Commander to whom she is assigned. Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren—these names mark her as property, her identity entirely contingent on the man who owns her reproductive capacity. Her original name is forbidden, a treasure she keeps buried in her mind, an amulet from an unimaginably distant past. She thinks of this name as buried, floating behind her eyes at night, shining in the dark. The loss of her name is a form of death; she tells herself it doesn't matter, that a name is like a telephone number, useful only to others, but she knows this is wrong. The regime's logic is explicit: women who have demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children are recruited for this purpose. All second marriages and nonmarital liaisons are declared adulterous, the female partners arrested, their children confiscated and adopted by childless couples of the upper echelons. The Handmaid is thus a woman who has already been a mother, now forced to bear children for others.

Relationships and Social Position

The Handmaid exists in a web of hostile relationships. The Wives resent her as a reproach and a necessity; Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, treats her with loathing, her voice thick with disgust when she orders her to 'get up and get out' after the Ceremony. The Marthas, the household servants, disapprove of her; Rita thinks she may be 'catching, like a disease,' and refuses to fraternize with her. The Econowives, the wives of poorer men, spit on the sidewalk as she passes. Even the other Handmaids are potential spies; they walk in pairs not for protection but so that each can report the other. The only relationships that offer any relief are those conducted in secret: the whispered exchanges with Ofglen, the illicit Scrabble games with the Commander, the desperate physical encounters with Nick. But these are all dangerous, and the Handmaid knows that any of them could lead to her reclassification as an Unwoman and shipment to the Colonies, where she would be used as expendable toxic-cleanup labor until her nose falls off and her skin pulls away like rubber gloves.

Resistance and Survival

Despite the totality of the regime's control, the Handmaid finds small ways to resist. She hoards butter to soften her skin, a private ceremony that allows her to believe she will someday be touched again in love or desire. She savors the tiny defiance of making eye contact with a young Guardian at a checkpoint, a 'small peephole' of possibility. She memorizes the Latin phrase scratched into her cupboard by the previous Handmaid—'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum'—and repeats it like a prayer, though she later learns it is only a schoolboy joke meaning 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.' She plays Scrabble with the Commander, a forbidden act that feels like freedom, 'an eyeblink of it.' She steals a match and hides it in her mattress, imagining she could burn the house down. She enters into a sexual relationship with Nick, knowing it could mean death, but doing it anyway because 'being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside.' These acts are not heroic; they are desperate, ambiguous, often selfish. But they are all she has. As she says, 'As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, 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.'