Huldah

Huldah is a schoolmate of Agnes Jemima at the Vidala School, a girl whose most notable feature is a squint. Agnes, reflecting on her own appearance, notes that she did not have a squint like Huldah, a detail that places Huldah among the less physically favored girls in a system where even the Aunts paid more attention to the pretty ones. This brief mention establishes Huldah as a point of comparison, a marker of the subtle but pervasive ranking of girls by their looks within the elite educational system of Gilead. Beyond this single physical characteristic, Huldah does not appear in any other scene or interaction, and her role in the narrative is confined to this one comparative observation by Agnes. She is a flat character, a name attached to a single trait, and her function is to illustrate the casual cruelty of the beauty standards that governed the lives of even the most privileged girls in Gilead.