Silver Pillbox

The Silver Pillbox is a small, ornate container that sits on the mantelpiece in the sitting room of the Commander's house, a room that embodies the frozen wealth and stifling propriety of Gilead's ruling class. Offred, kneeling in the room during the household's ceremonial gatherings, notices it among the other decorative objects—the scrolled ashtray, the dried flower arrangements, the white china Cupid with its lamb. The pillbox is part of the room's carefully curated surface, a detail in the larger tableau of Serena Joy's taste, which Offred describes as a strange blend of "hard lust for quality" and "soft sentimental cravings." It is an object of luxury, a remnant from the time before, and its presence in the room marks it as part of the material world that is both present and forbidden to the Handmaid.

The Object of Theft and Power

Offred's desire to steal the Silver Pillbox is a recurring fantasy of small-scale rebellion. She imagines taking it—or the scrolled ashtray, or a dried flower—and hiding it in the folds of her dress or her zippered sleeve, secreting it away in her room under the bed or in a shoe, or even in a slit cut into the hard petit point FAITH cushion on her window seat. The act of theft is not about the object's material value but about the feeling of power it would confer. She thinks, "It would make me feel that I have power." This fantasy is a direct response to her powerlessness, a way to carve out a tiny, private space of agency within a system that controls every aspect of her existence. The pillbox, as a small, precious, and easily concealed item, is the perfect vessel for this imagined transgression.

The Limits of Resistance

Despite the intensity of her longing, Offred never acts on the impulse to steal the Silver Pillbox. She immediately recognizes the danger, concluding that "such a feeling would be an illusion, and too risky." Her hands remain folded in her lap, her body still in its prescribed posture of submission. The pillbox thus becomes a marker of the boundary between fantasy and action, between the internal rebellion of the mind and the external compliance required for survival. The object itself is not taken, but the desire to take it is real and recurring, a small, private ceremony of defiance that she performs only in her imagination. It is one of the "tiny peepholes" of possibility she allows herself, a reward she holds out, like the candy she hoarded as a child.

The Context of Deprivation

The Silver Pillbox exists within a world of systematic deprivation, where even the most basic comforts and personal items are denied to Handmaids. Offred's body is treated as a "container," its exterior left to become "hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of a nut." The Wives have decreed that there be no hand lotion or face cream, as they do not want the Handmaids to look attractive. In this context, the pillbox—a container for medicine or sweets, a personal, intimate object—represents a form of care and self-possession that is forbidden. Offred's fantasy of stealing it is a fantasy of reclaiming a piece of that lost world, of possessing something that is purely her own, a secret treasure that could sustain her through the long, empty hours. The pillbox, like the butter she hoards to soften her skin, is a tool in the private "ceremonies of our own" that the Handmaids create to maintain a sense of self and hope.