"Blessed Are Those..."
Season One, Episode Three: “Late”
“I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen.” They “slaughtered Congress, blamed terrorists, suspended the Constitution,” Offred tells us early in this episode, “Late.” The one word of the title refers to Offred’s period being a few days late, prompting one of the household’s Marthas and the Commander’s wife to excitedly hope for a baby. Mrs. Waterford treats Offred with kindness while she thinks she might finally become a mother through her handmaid’s forced surrogacy.
But, ‘late’ also is what Offred, Luke, Moira, and Offred’s female co-workers were when they finally realized the country was a totalitarian state. Buying the line that freedoms were curtailed to protect citizens from the terrorist threat, Offred didn’t worry much until her personal, narrow world was touched: she—along with every other woman at her company and across the country—lost her job and her bank account. It took many men with big guns to enact the women’s evacuation from the office building. Menacing music swelled in the background as employees darted suspicious glances at each other and at the armed men. As Offred mechanically thanks one of these men for holding the door open as she shuffles out, he says “Under his Eye.” She whips her head back, sharper for a moment—“Excuse me?” It has begun for her, but it had actually started weeks before, with the mass murder of legislators, with the suffocation of a form of government, and--on a more quotidian level—when an ordinary run with a friend, personal music streaming from smartphone to ears, ended with a new male barista refusing service, calling her and Moira “fucking sluts.” The nightmare has started, like the zygote may have started developing in her womb without her awareness.
What this series of flashbacks shows is not a literal rendering of our world. Despite what some critics—a number who laud the series and a few who loathe it—have written, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not realist fiction; it is dystopian. It doesn’t represent America in 2017; it imagines, as dystopian writing does, what might happen if certain aspects of our world—ideas, policies, reactions—were carried to a logical conclusion. It doesn’t show us what is just around the corner; rather, it draws vivid pictures of a kind of world that might emerge, of a type of event that might transpire if we don’t take the buds out of our ears and listen and watch and question and stay awake. Stay woke.
What this episode also dramatizes is the old feminist adage that the personal is political. June was just caught up in her own personal life and world: her husband, her daughter, her good friend, her job, her jogs and coffee shop runs. She was like many of us. The political earthquakes were so much background noise until the politics hit her small corner of the world. It was the goal of the new theocratic regime to render everything personal as political, with childbearing as the ultimate service a red-robed slave could provide the State. Nothing is to matter to a woman other than having a child: both Offred and Serena Joy are judged by whether a baby will be born into the Commander’s home. In this they are joined, though not equally. Offred’s will be the labor; Serena Joy’s will be the mothering. But Serena Joy feels the censure of infertility harshly. It leads her to behave in a friendly and solicitous way to Offred at first, and then is behind her brutal treatment at the end. She morphs from “You’re my miracle, my beautiful miracle” to a rabid “You will stay here, and you will not leave this room. Do you understand me? Do you understand me?!!” on the turn of a dime—or the revelation of drops of blood in Offred’s underpants. Serena Joy fought for this regime; she wanted this regime. But, when it comes down to it, she too is maligned and boxed in, craving an understanding that she will not find in this patriarchal world.
Yet the harshest example of State-enforcement of its political will into the realm of the personal and sexual is the side story of Ofglen, something we do not see in the novel. The series imagines her as a lesbian, and in this episode she was caught in a relationship with a Martha. Her punishment is genital mutilation. When she wakes up from the surgery, looks down at her heavily bandaged crotch, Aunt Lydia comes in and calls her by her name: “Emily. You won’t want what you cannot have.” She will produce babies. And for that, pleasure and desire are superfluous.
The episode ends with the rough guitar and vocals of Jay Reatard’s “Waiting for Something”:
“It's not complete/I must compete/Stand on my feet/Live with these creeps/I'm sitting/waiting for something to happen…”
We must not sit and wait for something to happen, this story demands. We must make something happen. Before it’s too late. Before things get to the point at which Nick asserts to Offred that they are: “You can’t change anything about this. It’s gonna end the same no matter what you do. So there’s no point trying to be tough or brave. . . . Everybody breaks. Everybody.”
We’ll see. Offred ends up locked in her room, not pregnant after all. Ofglen ends up castrated, having watched her lover hang. Yet in the middle of it all, Offred commits a bold, political act: she remembers. She remembers words the way they were written, and highlights the way that the words were perverted. And, she does it bravely. To Aunt Lydia. Who has misquoted the bible to Offred, after questioning her about Ofglen and her lesbianism. Offred revealed that she knew that Ofglen was “gay,” a word that is now forbidden: “Remember your Scripture,” the evil Aunt exhorts Offred. “Blessed are the meek.” But Offred does remember, and recites it correctly, staring Aunt Lydia directly in the eye: “And blessed are those who suffer for the cause of righteousness. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I remember.”
Speaking truth to power. And remembering. These are ways to do more than sit and wait for something to happen.
