The Handmaid's Tale - Plot - Part 2/4

Chapter 13 'But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says...Her fault, Her fault.' Offred languishes in memory, her only means of escape. She equates herself to a prize breeding pig, fattened up and well maintained to fulfill her function. Even pigs, however, were allowed some distractions.  Offred remembers when Moira was brought to the Handmaid training gymnasium. She remembers the efforts they had to undertake to keep their friendship covert. She remembers the conditioning techniques employed by the Aunts.  She remembers Luke. She remembers her child, asleep from the sleeping pill, in her arms as they ran to escape this tyrannical regime.  She wakes up from this nightmare, one she has often. 

Chapter 14 'I would like to steal something from this room.' Offred describes the ritualized event that prefigures sex with the commander. The household gathers in the drawing room. The Marthas, Cora and Rita, are the first to arrive. Nick, the driver, stands back. After the staff comes Serena Joy, who is used to waiting for her husband. Offred and the others are 'treated' to some television while they wait.  Once again, Offred retreats into memory, offering the reader some further clues about the past. Their plan had been to cross the border into Canada. Luke had acquired some fake passports. They had made the trip look like a daytrip. After the first checkpoint, Luke is too confident. They were told not to look too happy. 

Chapter 15 'Blessed be this, blessed be that.' The commander enters the drawing room and the ritual proper begins. He unlocks a case where a bible is kept. His reading is again played out like a treat for the household, a symptom of the deep religious indoctrination of the Gilead regime.  The commander reads passages which are meant to justify the sexual act which is to follow. Some passages are original text. Some have been added by the regime.  The droning prayers recall the gymnasium, and Moira's first attempt to escape. She is captured and punished. Her feet are beaten and broken. Arms and legs are superfluous to creatures needed only for their wombs.

Chapter 16 'isn’t this everyone’s wet dream, two women at once?' Offred, Serena and Fred proceed to the master bedroom to perform 'The Ceremony'. Serena rests behind Offred, tightly holding her arms, while her husband rhythmically 'fucks' the handmaid. Offred is limp, her skirt hitched up to just above the waist.  This sexual act is an act without any sexual context. All three players perform their roles as expected of them - a duty for the state. Once over, the commander leaves. Serena expels Offred, who is left to wonder - 'Which of us is it worse for, her or me?'

Chapter 17 'It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy' After the ceremony, Offred retreats to her room to perform her own ritual. Without conventional skincare products -now deemed a vanity - she uses the butter she stole to moisturize her skin. Offred sneaks downstairs to satisfy her urge for rebellion, to steal something, as her life has been stolen. Nick enters the room. Offred is caught between conflicting feelings of lust and fear. Nick informs her that the commander, Fred, wishes to meet her secretly the following night.

Chapter 18 'nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.' Memories are all Offred owns. She once again retreats into herself to think of happier times. Occasionally, she is forced to consider what has happened to her family, but has no way to confirm her beliefs.  She believes Luke is dead. She believes Luke is decaying in a prison cell within Gilead. She believes Luke escaped. She believes Luke will come to rescue her.  At different times, she can believe in one or all of these possibilities. She has no way to know and no-one to help her find the truth. 

Chapter 19 'Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.' Offred begins another day, musing on the subjects of 'chair' and 'egg.' But her quiet is interrupted by the siren of a Birthmobile, come to collect her. All handmaids in the area are required for a birth. Ofwarren (Janine) is due.  In Gilead, doctors are seen as an afterthought in birth. The handmaids, the aunts and the wives are present. This is a celebration - the reason for the handmaids, that they may bear a child that they must immediately surrender to the wife of their household. In this chapter, we learn a little about the falling birth rates, due in part to pollution from ruptured nuclear reactors following a Californian earthquake. 

Chapter 20 'For the ones who come after you, it will be easier.' Chapter 20 illustrates the ritual of high birth in Gilead. The word 'ritual' implies a tradition, but the very concept of the handmaids and the other traditions of Gilead are brand new. This is not only the birth of a child, but also the birth of a cult, with women who remember a world more like the one we know.  Offred recalls the conditioning the handmaids received. The fear-mongering. The movies they were made to watch. The guilt imposed. The prayers recited.  This overwrites earlier memories of her feminist mother and the liberal Luke. Happier times. 'I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.', she says. 

Chapter 21 'Someone has spiked the grape juice.' A birth is an usual time for the handmaids, where the usual restrictions do not apply. The noise and lack of security means certain freedoms are easier to achieve. Handmaids share information - the whereabouts of friends, gossip, true feelings. No-one minds if they get a little drunk on these days, which are also a celebration and gathering for the wives.  When Ofwarren delivers a healthy baby girl ('poor thing'), there are tears of joy. She will be allowed to nurse it before the wife takes it as her own. 'After that she’ll be transferred, to see if she can do it again, with someone else who needs a turn. But she’ll never be sent to the Colonies, she’ll never be declared Unwoman. That is her reward.'

Chapter 22 'She was now a loose woman.' Tired from the birthing ceremony, Offred returns home and thinks about another happy story - Moira's second attempt at escape. Aunt Lydia had once told Janine what happened: Moira went to the bathroom and called in the supervising Aunt Elizabeth, because 'someone' had clogged the bowl with paper. Using a metal lever as a weapon, Moira hogtied the Aunt and stole her clothing.  Dressed as an Aunt, Moira simply walked out the front door and never returned. Moira is every handmaid's fantasy, the hope that a woman can challenge the established order and succeed. 

Chapter 23 'I want you to kiss me, said the Commander' After dinner, where Cora has been dreamily interrogating Offred about the birth, the handmaid sneaks back down to her liaison with Fred. She assumes he wants a debauched act which would be impossible in front of his wife and, in a way, she is right. Fred wants to play Scrabble. A highly seditious act in a land where women are forbidden the power of words: 'It’s as if he’s offered me drugs'. They play and Offred wins. Before she departs, Fred asks for a kiss - another off limit recreation. Offred can hardly refuse. 

Chapter 24 'He was not a monster, she said.' Having left the commander, Offred thinks back on the bizarre requests to play Scrabble and to be gently kissed.  It reminds her of a documentary she saw as a child. In it, the aged one-time mistress of a Nazi war criminal defends her former lover and claims no knowledge of the horrors he carried out. At the end of the documentary appears a notes explaining how she had taken her own life just days after filming.  Offred questions her own position in history but, in spite of herself, finds the situation very amusing. So much so, that she just her best to suppress the convulsions of a belly-laugh when she thinks it over.