The Handmaid’s Tale Part I: Night
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as i knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there, the miscue lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
I am struck by two images: the circles (in the basketball hoop, in the lines on the floor, in the seats around the perimeter) and the palimpsest. To me, these speak to the themes of despair, of circling, of coming back to what feels like the same old way of seeing or defining the world. We can't escape the circular path. In the end, women are right back where we began, in different costumes, but with the same misogyny. The same patriarchy. Same rules, same fears. This feels circuitous. (This isn't a hopeful reading.) It’s strangulation. It’s dying. It’s never, no matter how many years pass, knowing how to win. It’s accepting that this is the order of things. That men will always find a way to dominate women, and if that’s so, who am I to object to it as unfair, as wrong, as unnatural? Maybe it frustrates me, but it is the way thing are supposed to be. Otherwise why would it keep coming back. It must be a feature, not a bug.
This thought makes me wet. The feeling already in this book is like dominance. Reading it makes my breath catch, come fast and heavy, like underwater breath. There are no men in the room, but their presence is overbearing. Sweet and thick like honey. It feels like being beneath a man who’s twice my size and knowing I can’t get out. And then loving that feeling. Because I have to? Because it’s innate, because I do? I don’t know. What I do know is that the more I do it, the more intoxicating it feels. The harder it is to break free the next time. Like losing air. Like drowning. Like being slowly throttled, and allowed to breathe only when he lets me breathe.
Palimpsests are like circles too. They are documents where the past echoes through into the present. I am struck by the way that this image holds an overarching theme for the story to come. The idea that the past ways of seeing women will always come back to the present story. It doesn’t matter what length your skirt is; he comes back.
This opening is a palimpsest where Atwood, through her narrator, Offred, are lay the present on top of the past in images that are so jarring. The previous girls: felt-skirted, miniskirts, green-streaked hair. I think: the indicia of freedom are also objects, not women per se. There are no “real” women listed here. Instead, we have items that women wear. Even "before" when we were "free," we were in costumes that were about objectification. A skirt. A shorter skirt. “Alternative” hair. All the indicators of what type of girl you are, there on the surface, so the men who like that type can easily find them. Making yourself a better piece of arm candy. Grooming. Stuckness.
I feel like one of the ways in which women have been gaslit by patriarchy is that we accept readily that our value is as a commodity. We sexualize ourselves to "trade" for financial security, respect, a husband, Coachella tickets, whatever. Whatever shred of power we can have from making someone want us. Whatever makes his dick hard; is that power? It is a kind of proximate power, but not power itself. You always have to go through the gatekeeper to get it. And the gatekeeper is a man.
I know that was something that took me a long time to see, and I'm still working on undoing it. Honestly, here, I don’t know if it can be undone. Can my head be unfucked? Can I unsee myself the way I was raised to see myself? As a whole person, not a set of fuckable holes that grow less fuckable the older they get? At the end of this opening, we are given this:
The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.
So now we know that our narrator would gladly trade her body for a favor. At first, I think this realization is supposed to be shocking, but is it, really? Haven't women been born and bred to do that for all of time?
There’s ambiguity in it, too. Which part is the fantasy? That something could be exchanged? That they still had their bodies? Because, of course, it would be a false bargain. The men own their bodies already. You can’t trade what you don’t own.
Do we have our bodies now? Did we ever?
I think I know the answer.
I think the answer is no.
