Wives
The Wives of Gilead form the highest rank of women within the regime's rigid social hierarchy, yet their status is a gilded cage. Dressed in long, concealing dresses of sky blue or powder blue, they are the legal spouses of the Commanders, the men who designed and now enforce the Republic's theocratic order. Their primary function is to preside over the household and, crucially, to provide a legitimate, sanctioned context for the regime's central reproductive project: the Ceremony, in which a Handmaid is ritually impregnated by the Commander while the Wife lies beneath them, holding the Handmaid's hands to signify that they are "one flesh." This ritual, far from being a moment of unity, is a tableau of enforced intimacy and mutual humiliation, with the Wife gripping the Handmaid's hands so hard that her rings cut into the flesh, a gesture of control that is also an expression of rage and despair.
Identity and Domestic Realm
The Wives are defined by their domestic domain. They are expected to embody the regime's "traditional values," spending their time on approved activities such as knitting scarves for the Angels at the front lines, tending their gardens, and visiting other Wives who are ill. These gardens, like the one belonging to Serena Joy, are a space of ordered nature, where the Wife can direct a Guardian in the heavy digging and then kneel on a cushion to snip off seedpods with shears, a pastime that is both a performance of piety and a sublimation of frustrated energy. The Wives' sitting rooms are their territory, decorated with a "hard lust for quality" and "soft sentimental cravings"—authentic antiques alongside dried flower arrangements and a white china Cupid. It is a space of subdued, symmetrical luxury, where money has "trickled through... for years and years, crusting and hardening like stalactites." Yet this opulence is a prison; the Wife is confined to this room, to her knitting, to the endless waiting for a child that is not biologically hers.
Relationship with Handmaids
The relationship between a Wife and her Handmaid is the most fraught and central dynamic of the household. It is a relationship built on a foundation of mutual need and mutual loathing. The Wife resents the Handmaid as a "reproach" and a "necessity," a living symbol of her own failure to produce a child. The Handmaid, in turn, is an object of envy and fear, a woman who is younger, potentially fertile, and who engages in the sexual act that the Wife herself is denied. The Wives are warned by Aunt Lydia to be watched: "It's not the husbands you have to watch out for... it's the Wives." This warning is borne out in the constant, petty cruelties and the underlying threat of violence. The Wife has the power to have the Handmaid transferred to the Colonies or worse, and she wields this power with a cold, possessive jealousy. The Handmaid's body is a vessel for the Wife's desperate hope, and the Wife's own body, withered and arthritic, is a constant reminder of her own obsolescence.
Power, Envy, and the Absence of Freedom
Despite their rank, the Wives are profoundly powerless. They are denied the public roles they once held; Serena Joy, who was once a television singer and a political speaker advocating for women to stay home, is now "speechless," confined to her home, a bitter irony that has "taken her at her word." Their power is entirely negative: the power to punish, to withhold, to make the Handmaid's life miserable. They are trapped in a system they helped create, and their envy is a constant, corrosive presence. They envy the Handmaid's youth, her potential fertility, and even the sexual attention of their own husbands. This envy is palpable at a Birth Day, where the Wives crowd around the newborn, "cooing and congratulating," while "envy radiates from them... faint wisps of acid, mingled with their perfume." The Wives' lives are a study in the emptiness of a power that is only ever exercised over other women, a power that leaves them just as confined, just as objectified, and just as desperate as those they control.
Thematic Significance
The Wives represent the ultimate failure of the patriarchal bargain. They are the women who, in the time before, may have believed in the regime's rhetoric of "traditional values" and the sanctity of the home. They have been given exactly what they asked for—a world where women are protected, where they do not have to work, where they are the mistresses of their own domestic spheres—and they have found it to be a living death. Their existence is a cautionary tale about the seduction of power within a system of oppression. They are not merely victims; they are active participants in the subjugation of other women, and their own misery is the direct consequence of their complicity. The Wives are the ghosts of Gilead's future, a vision of what the Handmaids might become if they survive: bitter, barren, and utterly alone, presiding over a household that is a monument to their own irrelevance.
