The first time I read The Handmaid’s Tale, I struggled to get through the book. The world that Atwood had constructed frightened me. It was not the plausibility of a Gilead-esque government rising up in our modern times or the difficult-to-read scenes of extreme violence against women that made me shudder, it was the fact that many of these characters were familiar to me. Watching aunt Lydia brainwash the future-handmaids in the Rachel and Leah (RED) Center, I was reverted back to my eleven-year-old self. Still growing into my body and self-awareness, I listened to grown women tell me to accept less, to suffer in silence, that men were just born this way. Watching Serena Joy fail to offer Offred any semblance of protection, of sisterhood, reminded me of the betrayal I felt once I realized that I could have been spared so much pain and confusion had my matriarchal figures made the conscious decision to do better by me than their mothers did by them. The untrusting relationship between the handmaids mirrored the toxic female-female competition and degradation that make up the teenage years of many girls. What scared me about Atwood’s work is that, while she managed to beautifully construct a world as dark and twisted as Gilead, she didn’t have to invent the dynamics between the women that allowed such a regime to rise in the first place.
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” (Albright, 2016).
Although it has now become the preferred shield of white feminists, this quote adequately critiques the reality that women are instrumental in oppressing their fellow sisters when given the chance. The constructed caste system that separates women into various roles within Gilead’s society: handmaid, wife, Martha, aunt, etc. creates opportunities for solidarity or inter-caste oppression; unfortunately, those in higher positions generally chose the latter. The relationship between women in different positions within Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is symbolic of toxic femininity, what Muktha Manoj Jacob referred to as a “new form of misogyny: women's hatred of women”. Toxic masculinity generally refers to the internalized ideas of masculinity by men that leave them to perform gender in a way that negatively affects their ability to function. I would pose that toxic femininity, its counterpart, is the internalization of misogyny by women that leads them to buy into and uphold the same ideals that oppress them and women like them to their own detriment. In Atwood’s world, as well as our own, there are two main types of inter-gender oppression that occurs as a result of toxic masculinity: instruction and peer-peer reinforcement.
The dynamic between aunts/wives and handmaids mirrors how female role models and familial figures are instrumental in instilling internalized misogyny within young girls, thereby taking the most active role in upholding a system that actively oppresses them. To me, these instructors teach the discipline of subservience and repression through two methods: the method of instruction, utilized by the aunts, and the method of complacency, preferred by the Wives.
“I know this must feel so strange, but ordinary is just what you're used to. This may not be ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary” (Atwood, 73)
Instruction is the active process of ingraining a normalized perception of behavior into a vulnerable student. The vulnerability of the captives of the RED Center stems from their lack of agency, the vulnerability of such students in the real world is their young age and innocence. To me, the title of aunt given to the women in charge of training and punishing budding handmaids is appropriate given the fact that any older woman is called khaltu (aunt) in my culture out of a sign of both respect and familiarity. It is normally these women, as well as immediate, female family members that spew the rhetoric: “Close your legs when you sit…he only teases you because he likes you…you can’t do_________ because the women that do are whores”. They may not teach ceremony crash courses, but they do prepare you for a lifetime starved for male validation and fulfillment through pleasing men. They may not hold cattle prods, but sometimes they do hold knives for female circumcision. Generally donning colorful, modest robes as opposed to the dull brown, these are the women largely responsible for creating the culture of accepted violence against women in Sudan. They perfectly execute “the feminine roles that support and enable the repression of other women” (Jacob, 85). They tell us to go home to our husband, that this is marriage, reinforcing Aunt Lydia’s sentiment that “Love is not the point”, service is (Atwood, 121). Excusing the behavior of men and making shame the go-to emotion, our khaltus, our aunts, make it so that men need not even involve themselves in the construction of a system created to benefit them.
"I was disappointed. I wanted, then, to turn her into an older sister, a motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me" (Atwood, 10).
Ahhh, the other woman. No, not the mistress! The other type of maternal figure that fails you during the time you need her the most. Offred begins her relationship with Serena Joy hoping for some semblance of mercy and protection, neither of which she gets from the older woman. Instead, Serena does what many women in matriarchal positions do, they reinforce oppressive norms by a refusal to intervene. We see this in the women who turn blind eyes to the abuse of those around them, who refuse to speak up for those who cannot defend themselves against a society that is constructed to chew them up and spit them out. I’ve eaten meals with this woman, put my trust in this woman, made excuses for this woman, hoping that someday she would prove me wrong. This woman is miserable in a system that she cannot find a way out of and so she inflicts cruelty on the only people she has any semblance of control over. This woman looks at her daughter, her niece, her granddaughter and sees a reflection of potential that she no longer has. Instead of offering a safe space in whatever limited capacity she can, she redirects her anger from the men she cannot criticize, to the vulnerable woman reliant on her kindness. Still, we, like Offred, must humor her and at times work with her to achieve whatever limited sense of joy we can get, until we are in a position to do more. This woman is angry at the world she helped create when she allowed her husband to take her career and ambitions, angry at herself for not saying something when she could have. But because anger is reserved for the husband and not the wife, this anger becomes reserved for the younger, prettier woman she wishes she could be. Offred’s fertility is symbolic of the youth older woman are trained to hate in younger women because it reminds them of everything they allowed to happen that made them waste their youth.
"The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers" (Atwood, 19).
While the ideals that govern a patriarchal system are taught by Aunts and emboldened by the Bystander mindset of the wives, they are reinforced by the interactions between the handmaids. The handmaids are paired off into sets of two for supposed reasons of companionship and safety; however, the true purpose, according to Offred, is to report on each other to the government. The most likely allies to each other, their relationships are soiled by distrust and competition. These peer-peer relationships are the relationships between women of the same class and are reflective of the way that women monitor and judge each other in our society, holding each other to certain standards that reinforce patriarchal values. Canonized and normalized by films such as Mean Girls, toxic dynamics of slut-shaming, body-shaming, and creating unhealthy competition over the attention of men are among many crimes that we commit against ourselves through others. Offred’s relationships with the two different Ofglen’s reflects the potential relationships between women to create or distrust safe spaces for women. The first Ofglen was initially distrustful but grew to be a true friend and confidant to Offred. Giving her inside information on how to resist the institutional misogyny that fuels Gilead, Ofglen offers Offred tools to survive and even dismantle some of the ways in which her society threatens her. However, this relationship is short-lived as the two are forced apart and another Ofglen is put into Offred’s life. This one insistent on operating within the prescribed norms and values of Gilead.
“Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.” (Atwood, 21).
Ofglen #1 is a familiar face. Ofglen #1 gave me Audre Lorde books and showed me photographs of women who developed amorous relationships with their stretch marks. Ofglen #1 was instrumental in the birth of a socially conscious me. Ofglen #1 was too eaten by the same society she gave the middle finger to until she couldn’t hold it up no more. Ofglen #2 swooped in and sent me three feet back in terms of accepting myself and denouncing society instead of the other way around. Ofglen #1 deserves better, but so does Ofglen #2. We are taught to talk about boys and to paint each other’s nails and to pick out prom dresses. We can even go so far as to rant about the way that the system affects us. What we are not taught to do is take a magnifying glass to the system, share notes on its weaknesses and plot the best course of action for dismantlement. What we are not taught to do is support each other in the reconstruction of the deepest places we hurt. We can apply band-aids, but reconstructive surgery is not in the list of acceptable activities.
The pursuit for gender equality will never fully reach its goal unless it devotes attention to the dismantlement of toxic femininity as well as toxic masculinity. Atwood’s recognition of this fact makes her work poignant and relevant in highlighting an issue that is generally swept under the rug. This is not to excuse the actions of men or their role in the creation of the unjust world we live in. The slippery nature of misogyny, that has allowed it to survive for the entirety of recorded human history, is the absence of a clear root. So, I stand by Atwood’s well-rounded approach to examining the way that we are hurt by men, but also the way that we hurt ourselves. Until we are able to come to terms with the less simple, less flattering truth, we can never make substantial change.
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