More on Handmaid’s Tale: Sympathy for the Devil(‘s Wife)

An interesting thing that I’ve noticed about this class and its readings in particular is that they all, in some form or another, consistently approach topics about women’s sexuality in a myriad of different contexts and scenarios. Handmaid’s Tale, my personal favorite of the bunch, is set in and preoccupies itself with the policing of a woman’s body in terms of her sexuality and her ability to carry children. In Gilead, Handmaids are forced to act as surrogates for the wealthy women and have to undergo extensive training and health screenings before even being allowed to function in society. They are marked as different by the clothes they wear and the behaviors they exhibit, and have virtually no rights beyond being allowed to live in someone’s house and have sex with their husbands in order to give the wives children that aren’t theirs. In a sense, I feel a sense of pity for the wives, because their role as a parent is drastically reduced to being an icon, a set-piece that has no real function or meaning. The woman formerly known as Serena Joy, and her friends in the same position, have to endure a warped version of adultery, reminiscent of the rare story of women who raise the child of their husband’s mistress as their own, all the while having to pretend that, by association with the man that created the child, it is part of their family and that she has a maternal right to the child.

I know that we are supposed to feel bad for the Handmaid’s, and I do, but I also feel as if there isn’t enough attention to the Wives, and I think that a novel from her point of view would be interesting. It would have to focus a lot on her emotional and mental perceptions of things, her thoughts about the children of others, if she even would be comfortable with the Commander having a child, and also how much she knows about his covert nighttime ventures with his Handmaids.