The Dangerous Myth of Redemption: June’s Forgiveness of Serena
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In The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most troubling narrative choices of the final seasons is the framing of June’s apparent forgiveness of Serena Joy. Serena, June’s abuser and rapist, a central architect of Gilead’s terror, receives not accountability but empathy — an empathy the show encourages viewers to share. This choice does not merely distort character arcs; it sends a dangerous message about abuse, complicity, and the nature of forgiveness in the face of oppression.
Serena is not just another woman surviving within a patriarchal regime. She is one of Gilead’s foundational architects — a woman who advocated for the removal of women’s rights in a book entitled A Woman’s Place, while never living by the doctrine she helped create. She was not a passive wife but an active political operative: writing policy, speaking publicly, and even participating in the planning of violent attacks that led to Gilead’s formation — including assaults on the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court. She is portrayed as believing wholeheartedly in Gilead’s ideology, continuing to support it well into later seasons. In every instance where she could have escaped or defected, she instead chose to stay — or, when temporarily exiled, to return.
The fact that she is ultimately trapped within the world she built should not compel viewer sympathy. Her rare and self-serving attempts to change aspects of the regime are always motivated by personal stakes — not empathy or principle. Even after Noah is born, she shows no interest in full-time motherhood, entrusting his care to Marthas while seeking status and influence. Her arc is not one of awakening, but of strategic adaptation. The show’s portrayal of her as a tragic mother or fallen believer whitewashes the very system she created — and the cost of that narrative leniency is paid by characters like June.
A Mother First, a Monster Second: Serena’s Self-Justification
Since Season 1, Serena has been portrayed as both victim and perpetrator, but crucially, she remains ideologically aligned with Gilead’s core principles. Though she occasionally expresses personal regret about how she treated June — moments that the show highlights as supposed growth — Serena never truly repents for building the regime or enabling its horrors. Her emotional center remains tied to her own desires: power, recognition, and above all, motherhood. Even Yvonne Strahovski, who portrays Serena, has expressed skepticism about her character’s redemptive potential, stating in an interview: “I mean, it would take a lot to make her redeemable ... maybe she should become a nun or something. … It’s all for her own sake.” She elaborates further, acknowledging that while Serena may be aware of her wrongdoings, “she justifies them constantly because of her own personal circumstances… It’s a selfish survival mode, it’s not for the greater good of others.” (AwardsRadar, 2021). This actor’s insight aligns with the show’s textual portrayal: Serena’s choices are never truly altruistic, only strategic, and motivated by self-interest
Serena’s justification for Gilead’s terror crystallizes in her belief that “maybe it was all worth it.” This chilling admission reveals that, for Serena, the suffering of others — including June — was a price she was willing to pay to achieve her goal. Gilead, in her eyes, made her a mother, and that personal fulfillment absolves the system’s crimes.
She may have deeply wanted to become a mother, but she never showed any desire to be a full-time caregiver; her priority was always power and influence. Serena only pursued surrogacy via Handmaids after "window shopping" for kidnapped children — a chilling flashback in Season 5 shows her and Naomi evaluating children as if they were accessories. When her first Handmaid dies by suicide, Serena doesn’t mourn her — she’s angry that her reproductive plans have been disrupted. And even after Noah’s birth, Serena hands off most caregiving duties to household staff, contradicting her supposed maternal ideal.
As feminist theorists like bell hooks have noted, the tendency to excuse women’s complicity in patriarchal systems by framing them as victims of their own circumstances is deeply problematic. It shifts the lens from responsibility to sympathy, allowing women like Serena — women with power and agency — to hide behind sentimentality and strategic tears.
When Forgiveness Becomes Betrayal: June’s Survivor Story Undermined
June is often portrayed as a deeply Christian and forgiving woman — a trait the show emphasizes throughout the series. And yet, this identity is at odds with some of her most reckless decisions, many of which have led to unnecessary deaths in the name of her personal mission. That contradiction becomes especially glaring in her selective forgiveness. She extends empathy and grace to Serena, her abuser and rapist, but withholds it from Nick — the father of her child, the love of her life, and the man who risked his life repeatedly to help and protect her.
Nick’s so-called betrayal, which June condemns without hesitation, involved him revealing vague information about the Mayday plan under extreme duress. He never exposed names or concrete details. In fact, according to Max Minghella’s interview and the subtext of the scene, Nick assumed Wharton already knew about the plan and was merely testing him. It wasn’t betrayal — it was survival. Had Nick refused to speak, he likely would have ended up on the Wall. The choice was no choice at all. And yet, June’s response is not understanding, but condemnation.
This double standard reaches its peak when June lets Nick board a plane she knows has been planted with explosives — an attack orchestrated via Lawrence. Meanwhile, she embraces Joseph Lawrence, who refused to help her find Hannah, stood by as commanders plotted to kill her, and was complicit in shooting down the planes that were meant to raid Hannah’s school and rescue the children. She also grows closer to Aunt Lydia, who tortured her and her friends, mutilated Janine, and remained loyal to Gilead’s ideology for years.
This selective moral logic undermines June’s arc. It asks the audience to accept a distorted sense of justice where charismatic abusers are forgiven, while allies who falter under impossible conditions are discarded. It’s not only unrealistic — it’s narratively irresponsible.
When evaluating Serena’s role in June’s brutal rape, carried out at nine months pregnant, the show’s creators themselves emphasize that there is no ambiguity in Serena’s culpability. In an interview, writer Yahlin Chang makes clear that Serena actively “helped Fred rape June to make the baby come faster,” saying the brutality reflects Gilead’s normalization of assault:
“They don’t see any problem with that… I wanted to get it to the truth of sexual assault.” (The Washington Post, 2018)
This branding of the act as political realism underscores Serena’s moral agency: she does not hesitate to weaponize June’s body to satisfy her own longing for a child — even as June nears full term. That level of direct orchestration leaves no room for the sentimental forgiveness the narrative later grants her.
Serena’s cruelty is not limited to a single episode. She has a long record of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse toward June. After suspecting that June was pregnant — and then discovering she wasn’t — Serena punished her by confining her to her room for two weeks. She slapped, pushed, and physically assaulted her repeatedly — once smashing her head into a doorframe. She drove her fingernails into June’s hands during the Ceremony. She arranged Nick’s forced marriage to Eden and showed excitement at a wedding where visibly underage girls — no older than 13 or 14 — were married off. She paraded Hannah in front of June like a hostage and repeatedly used the child as a threat. Her cruelty was not incidental or coerced; it was sustained, intentional, and fueled by possessiveness and rage.
Despite Serena’s unrepentant stance, the show increasingly positions June as a figure of compassion toward her. The narrative aesthetic — soft music, tender close-ups, Serena’s tears — encourages viewers to see Serena primarily through the lens of her maternal suffering rather than her role as an oppressor. June’s gestures of empathy, from aiding Serena in childbirth to comforting her in moments of vulnerability, are framed as signs of June’s strength and healing. But this depiction misrepresents the realities of trauma and recovery.
As trauma theorists have argued, genuine healing does not depend on — and is often undermined by — offering forgiveness to an unrepentant abuser. On the contrary, forgiveness that is premature or demanded by social or narrative pressures can retraumatize the survivor, deepening the harm. The Handmaid’s Tale, however, seems to valorize June’s capacity to empathize with Serena as though it is a necessary step toward her own liberation — sidelining the need for justice and accountability.
The Perils of Sympathizing with the Oppressor
By romanticizing June’s forgiveness of Serena, The Handmaid’s Tale undermines its own feminist foundation. The series was initially celebrated for exposing patriarchal violence with stark clarity, offering little comfort to those complicit in oppression. Yet in its later seasons, that clarity erodes. The moral weight of the story shifts from the survivors of Gilead’s cruelty to the emotional struggles of its enforcers.
Elisabeth Moss herself describes the June-Serena dynamic in strikingly intimate terms, calling it “the centerpiece of the show. It is the love story of the show. They’re the heroes and the villains of the show, and they often trade places in those roles.” (Vanity Fair, 2025) This framing lays bare the series’ approach: Serena and June are positioned as moral equals whose bond transcends their history of violence and abuse.
But this interpretation is deeply troubling. By romanticizing a relationship born of exploitation and cruelty, the show risks blurring essential moral lines. What began as a tale of survival and resistance against oppression transforms into a narrative where the abuser and the victim are cast as co-protagonists in a mutual drama — their power dynamics softened, their crimes reframed as mere chapters in a complicated love story. In doing so, the series undermines its own critique of patriarchy, offering redemption where none was earned and asking viewers to invest in an emotional arc that obscures the need for accountability.
Serena’s redemption arc is not earned through transformation or accountability, but through the emotional labor of her victim — a dynamic that feminist philosophers like Kate Manne have identified as central to the maintenance of misogynistic systems. The cultural narrative that emerges suggests that women’s participation in oppressive regimes is forgivable, even understandable, so long as they conform to familiar roles of suffering or maternal devotion. This is a dangerous message, as it not only distorts the ethics of the story’s world but also risks normalizing similar patterns in the real world, where abusers are often shielded by sentimentality and the myth of personal redemption without accountability.
In the end, June’s forgiveness of Serena is framed as a triumph of compassion over hatred, but in truth, it represents a failure to honor the survivor’s story. It offers a fantasy of absolution for the unrepentant — a dangerous myth that serves neither justice nor healing.
The implication is chilling: redemption is not about moral reckoning or change, but about who the narrative chooses to protect. Charisma, motherhood, and suffering become shields for cruelty — even as quiet, loyal resistance, like Nick’s, is punished or forgotten.
Beauty, Youth, and Sympathy: How the Show Shapes Our View of Serena
Another subtle yet significant way The Handmaid’s Tale distorts the moral clarity of Serena’s character lies in its casting and characterization choices. In Margaret Atwood’s original novel, Serena is an older woman, her power diminished not only by Gilead’s patriarchal structures but also by the way those structures devalue women past their reproductive prime. The novel’s Serena embodies the consequences of a system that punishes all women, even those who helped build it — a bitter, discarded architect of her own cage.
The show, however, deliberately alters this dynamic. By casting a younger, strikingly beautiful actress as Serena — and by crafting the character to be closer in age and life stage to June — the series invites a different kind of viewer response. The age gap that symbolized Serena’s loss of status in the book is erased; instead, Serena becomes a figure of misplaced potential, a woman viewers are encouraged to see as still vibrant, desirable, and emotionally complex. This is compounded by the charisma and vulnerability that Yvonne Strahovski brings to the role — traits that, while a testament to the actress’s skill, contribute to the moral confusion surrounding Serena’s actions.
This choice taps into a well-documented cultural bias: audiences are more inclined to empathize with attractive characters, particularly when their suffering is framed in familiar, humanizing ways. As feminist thinkers such as Naomi Wolf have argued, beauty functions as a kind of currency within patriarchy — one that can grant power, obscure culpability, and manipulate perception. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf describes how cultural narratives often conflate a woman’s value with her appearance, conditioning audiences to see beauty as a proxy for virtue or worth. Similarly, Laura Mulvey’s critique of visual culture notes how cinema trains viewers to find pleasure — and thus sympathy — in looking at beautiful women, even when their actions warrant moral scrutiny.
By making Serena younger, more beautiful, and emotionally layered through casting and scripting choices, the series not only departs from Atwood’s sharp commentary on the cost of complicity but also reinforces antifeminist tropes. It suggests, however unintentionally, that oppressive women are more forgivable — or at least more worthy of our sympathy — if they are attractive and charismatic. As Susan Bordo has pointed out, this dynamic reflects a deeper cultural logic that binds women’s moral and social value to their bodies, inviting audiences to forgive or excuse when those bodies conform to certain ideals.
The result is a narrative that prioritizes Serena’s humanity over the dehumanization she inflicted on others — and ultimately, over the humanity of those who were never granted the same narrative grace. This is especially striking when contrasted with the show’s treatment of Nick — a character who, despite his emotional restraint and consistent moral compass, is given significantly less screen time and far fewer opportunities for emotional framing. His sacrifice is quiet, his pain internal, and his love expressed in subtle, selfless gestures. His stoicism may be misread by some as detachment, but to viewers with literary, psychological, or visual literacy — or simply higher emotional intelligence — it’s clear that Nick is one of the most tender, brave, and quietly heroic characters in the series. Serena, on the other hand, remains emotionally volatile and fundamentally self-serving. Apart from Fred — already dead by the final season — she is perhaps the coldest main character, yet her beauty and vulnerability ensure that she is constantly rehumanized by the narrative. In the end, the show teaches us that redemption is not earned — it is framed.
Rather than exposing how systems like Gilead exploit and discard women, The Handmaid’s Tale risks reinforcing the very ideologies it set out to critique: that a woman’s worth, even as a villain, remains tied to her appearance and ability to evoke desire or pity.
Conclusion: The Price of Selective Forgiveness
The Handmaid’s Tale has always been a story about moral ambiguity — about the impossible choices people make to survive within a system designed to strip them of power, agency, and integrity. Its early power came from its unflinching portrayal of these complexities: how even small acts of defiance carried enormous risk, and how survival often required compromises that blurred the line between victim and collaborator.
Yet in its later seasons, the show loses sight of that moral subtlety, offering a fractured vision of justice that undermines the complexity it once honored. June’s journey — once defined by the brutal reality of surviving and resisting within a system designed to strip her of power— becomes clouded by selective forgiveness that follows no ethical logic, only narrative convenience and emotional manipulation.
Elisabeth Moss framed June’s forgiveness not as something she offers to Serena, but as something she does “for Noah“.
„June knows that Serena does need that forgiveness, and June is big enough to give it. She’s a pretty great person.” (Vanity Fair, 2025) This framing highlights the show’s attempt to portray June’s forgiveness as noble — but it sidesteps the question of whether such forgiveness is just. The moral weight shifts from Serena’s accountability to June’s capacity for empathy, erasing the need for genuine atonement.
We see June extend compassion and even trust to characters whose hands are stained with the very crimes she fought to survive. Commander Lawrence, the architect of Gilead and the inventor of the Colonies, orchestrated the bombing that killed innocents in Chicago, ordered planes to be shot down as they attempted to raid Hannah’s school, and stood by silently as Gilead’s leadership plotted June’s death. Aunt Lydia oversaw torture, mutilation, and humiliation of handmaids for years, burning hands, gouging out eyes, and enforcing the regime’s ideology with zeal. Serena subjected June to relentless cruelty: physical violence, orchestrated rape, psychological torment, and the exploitation of June’s own daughter as a weapon. And yet, June forgives them. She comforts Serena, allies herself with Lawrence, and accepts Lydia’s supposed change of heart — without any of these figures ever fully reckoning with their actions.
By contrast, Nick — who repeatedly risked his life to protect June and Nicole, who worked quietly against Gilead, who fathered June’s child without ever asserting ownership or control — is cast out. His loyalty is questioned, his presence is rejected, and no forgiveness is offered. The show frames him as somehow tainted — not by his actions, but simply by the uniform he wears, or the role he plays within Gilead’s ranks, despite his resistance from within.
Bruce Miller acknowledges this tension, admitting, “Serena’s done unforgivable things. I don’t think there’s any forgiving her as a human being. But can June forgive her? Redemption just doesn’t seem like something that exists in the world. It’s a nice idea in a fictional story, but if our story is going to help the audience navigate the world, it can’t be that picture.” (Vulture, 2025) Yet, despite this, the narrative does seem to present a picture of redemption — or at least of softened judgment — for Serena, using motherhood and vulnerability as shields. This contradiction mirrors the show’s broader inconsistency: it claims to eschew simplistic redemption arcs, yet writes them into its fabric through emotional manipulation.
This inconsistency reflects, and reinforces, a dangerous cultural message. As feminist thinkers such as Kate Manne, Naomi Wolf, and Susan Bordo have shown, societies are conditioned to excuse harm when it comes wrapped in beauty, maternal longing, or charm. The Handmaid’s Tale — perhaps unwittingly — participates in this dynamic. The beauty, charisma, or proximity to parenthood of Serena, Lydia, and Lawrence becomes a shield that softens our view of their crimes. Serena’s biological motherhood, Lydia’s self-fashioned maternal role toward Janine, and Lawrence’s growing bond with Charlotte each provide a veneer of humanity that the show uses to invite sympathy — even in the absence of true atonement. Meanwhile, Nick — who longs to be present for his daughter but is denied that opportunity — is left without such narrative protection, his loyalty overlooked and his isolation reinforced.
What’s most troubling is not that June’s feelings are complicated — true complexity would enrich the narrative. It is that the show offers no coherent moral framework for forgiveness or condemnation. It invites us to sympathize with unrepentant abusers, while isolating those who resisted. In doing so, The Handmaid’s Tale ceases to critique the dynamics of power; instead, it becomes complicit in the very patterns of selective empathy it once sought to expose. A show that began as a searing portrait of resistance ends by asking its heroine — and its audience — to do the emotional labor of forgiving the unforgivable. That is not catharsis. That is capitulation.
For the most recent and complete versions, please visit my Medium profile: https://medium.com/@drlitcrit
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