the garden
The garden at the Commander's house is a carefully maintained space that belongs to Serena Joy, serving as both a site of domestic order and a landscape where buried desires and suppressed truths push wordlessly toward the light. It is the domain of the Commander's Wife, who directs a Guardian in the heavy digging while she herself kneels on a cushion, a light blue veil thrown over her wide gardening hat, a basket at her side with shears and pieces of string for tying the flowers into place. Many of the Wives have such gardens, something for them to order and maintain and care for. From a distance it looks like peace.
Layout and Appearance
The garden is large and tidy, with a lawn in the middle and a willow tree weeping catkins. Around the edges are flower borders where daffodils fade and tulips open their cups, spilling out color. The tulips are red, a darker crimson toward the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there. Offred, looking out through her shatterproof window, has often seen Serena Joy in the garden, her knees on a cushion, directing the Guardian who does the heavy digging. Offred once had a garden herself and can remember the smell of turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, the dry rustle of seeds through the fingers. Time could pass more swiftly that way.
Serena Joy's Domain
Serena Joy is the garden's mistress. She has a chair brought out and sometimes just sits in it, her cane beside her on the grass. Offred watches her sideways as she goes past with her shopping basket, and once saw Serena Joy kneeling on a cushion, snipping off the seedpods with a pair of shears. She was aiming, positioning the blades, then cutting with a convulsive jerk of the hands. Offred wondered whether it was the arthritis creeping up, or some blitzkrieg committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers. To cut off the seedpods is supposed to make the bulb store energy. Offred often amuses herself with small mean-minded bitter jokes about Serena Joy, but not for long; it does not do to linger, watching Serena Joy from behind. What Offred coveted was the shears.
The Garden's Subversive Quality
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upward, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. Light pours down upon it from the sun, but heat also rises from the flowers themselves, like holding your hand an inch above an arm, a shoulder. It breathes, in the warmth, breathing itself in. To walk through it in the days of peonies, of pinks and carnations, makes Offred's head swim. The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up Offred's spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of her thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of her eyes there are movements in the branches: feathers, flirtings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. Even the bricks of the house are softening, becoming tactile. It is amazing what denial can do.
Narrative Significance
The garden functions as a space of contrast and hidden meaning. It is the domain of the Commander's Wife, a place where she exercises control and performs her role, yet it also reveals her vulnerability and the limits of her power. For Offred, the garden is a reminder of the past she has lost and a landscape that mirrors her own suppressed desires. The flowers, the willow, the very air of the garden carry a charge of longing and subversion that the regime cannot entirely suppress. The garden is also where Serena Joy makes her proposal to Offred about Nick, sitting under the willow tree, knitting, with her cane propped at her elbow, a moment of collusion that takes place in this seemingly peaceful setting.
