Wall with Hooks

The Wall with Hooks is the most visible instrument of Gilead's public terror, a red-brick boundary hundreds of years old that once enclosed a university campus and now serves as the regime's primary display site for executed bodies. It is not merely a barrier but a curated spectacle: the hooks set into the brickwork, described as looking like "appliances for the armless" or "steel question marks, upside-down and sideways," are purpose-built fixtures that turn human beings into hanging objects. The Wall is reinforced with ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts, barbed wire along the bottom, and broken glass set in concrete along the top, making clear that its precautions are for those trying to get out, though reaching it from inside past the electronic alarm system is next to impossible. No one goes through those gates willingly.

Location and Architecture

The Wall stands beside the main gateway of what was once a university, its red brick now a backdrop for the hanged. The gates have sentries, and the entire structure is retrofitted with modern surveillance and deterrents that clash with its antique surface. The hooks themselves are permanent installations, not improvised; they are occupied or vacant depending on the frequency of executions, and the bodies are left hanging for days until a new batch replaces them, so that as many people as possible will have the chance to see them. The Wall is also the destination of the narrator's and Ofglen's daily walks: they stop before it "together as if on signal," and the narrator notes that looking is not merely permitted but required—"this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall."

The Display of Executed Bodies

The bodies are always presented with white bags over their heads, which the narrator finds worse than faces would be: the bags make the men "like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way they are, since they are meant to scare." The heads appear heavy and vacant, "zeros," though the outlines of features can be seen as gray shadows beneath the cloth. On one occasion a bag has blood seeping through where the mouth must have been, forming "another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children"—a detail that fixes the narrator's attention and shatters the illusion that these are merely snowmen. The bodies wear white coats like those of doctors or scientists, and each has a placard hung around its neck showing a drawing of a human fetus, marking them as former abortion providers executed retroactively for crimes that were legal at the time. Other placards include purple ones reading "Gender Treachery" for Guardians caught together, and an upside-down cross for a Catholic. The narrator scans the bodies each time, partly to confirm that none of them is Luke, and feels "blankness" and "relief" when she does not find him.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Wall functions as a daily memento mori and a test of the narrator's psychological survival. She must make careful distinctions between the red of the blood on the bag and the red of the tulips in Serena Joy's garden, insisting that "each thing is valid and really there" and that she must pick her way through a field of such valid objects. The Wall is also a site of potential communication: when it is empty, the narrator finds it more foreboding than when it is occupied, because "vacant, it is also potential, like a storm approaching." The hooks themselves become a recurring image of the state's power to reduce persons to objects, and the narrator's repeated visits to the Wall—always with Ofglen, always as part of the prescribed routine—embed state terror into the texture of everyday life. The Wall is the place where the regime's ideology of retroactive justice and public deterrence is made most literal, and where the narrator's own capacity for hope and denial is most sharply tested.