The Previous Handmaid
The Previous Handmaid is the ghostly predecessor who haunts Offred's room in the Commander's house, a woman known only through the traces she left behind: a scratched Latin phrase in a cupboard, a suicide that forced the removal of the chandelier, and a story that Offred pieces together from fragments of gossip and her own imagination. She is at once a warning, a companion, and a mirror—a figure whose fate shadows Offred's every attempt to endure.
Identity and Traces
The Previous Handmaid is never named. Offred discovers her existence three days after arriving at the house, when she examines the room minutely and finds, scratched into the floor of the cupboard in the darkest corner, the words "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum." The writing is tiny, fresh-looking, made with a pin or a fingernail. Offred does not know what it means or even what language it is in, but she recognizes it as a forbidden message, intended for whoever came next. The phrase pleases her; she repeats it to herself and imagines the woman who wrote it as about her own age, with freckles, irreverent and resourceful—she turns her into Moira as Moira was in college. The message becomes a small joy, a communion with an unknown woman whose taboo words made it through to at least one other person.
Fate and Revelation
Offred learns more about the Previous Handmaid through cautious questioning of Rita. When she asks who stayed in the room before her, Rita's grudging response—"Which one?"—reveals that there have been more than one, and that some did not stay their full two-year posting. Offred guesses at "the lively one, the one with freckles," and Rita, accepting the lie that Offred knew her before, says only, "She didn't work out." The full truth comes later, from the Commander himself. When Offred asks him about the Latin phrase, he laughs and explains it is a schoolboy joke meaning "Don't let the bastards grind you down." Then, almost casually, he tells her what happened: "She hanged herself. That's why we had the light fixture removed. In your room." He adds that Serena found out, which explains it. Offred realizes the Previous Handmaid must have learned the phrase in this very room, during some previous period of confidences with the Commander—she was not the first to enter his silence and play word games with him. The knowledge that her predecessor died by hanging, using a bedsheet, and that Cora found her, gives Offred a visceral understanding of the room's history and the stakes of her own position.
Narrative and Thematic Significance
The Previous Handmaid functions as Offred's double and her warning. Offred feels her presence in the room, imagining her turning in midair under the chandelier, a woman made into an angel, waiting to be found. The scratched message, once a prayer or a command, becomes in Offred's darkest moments a sad graffiti, an ancient hieroglyph to which the key has been lost. Yet the Previous Handmaid also offers a kind of companionship: Offred thinks of her as "my ancestress, my double," and realizes she was never alone in the room—there were always two of them. The Previous Handmaid's suicide is both a cautionary tale about the regime's power to break a woman and a testament to the small acts of resistance—a scratched message, a hidden phrase—that can survive even death. Her fate underscores the lethal consequences of discovery and the thin line between endurance and despair that every Handmaid walks.
