"Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, Bitches"

Season One, Episode Four: “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum”

This episode illustrates the importance of forging genuine connections with others, connections that support an individual’s choices and right to be different, while still drawing strength from the collective and its well of shared identity and experience. And, it focuses on the important role critical literacy plays in creating and maintaining those connections and one’s sense of identity. According to City University of New York English professor, Ira Shor, “We can redefine ourselves and remake society, if we choose, through alternative rhetoric and dissident projects. This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane. Critical literacy thus challenges the status quo in an effort to discover alternative paths for self and social development” (“What Is Critical Literacy?” 1999).

As in previous episodes, the theme is drawn out through highlights of the stark contrast between the work of resistant handmaids and that of the regime. The handmaids are shown to do whatever they can in their almost hopelessly restrictive environments to keep literacy alive and a means of connection to others who come later. This occurs while the leaders of Gilead forbid literacy, so that they can employ a perverse or overly-literal interpretation of biblical passages—a highly uncritical literacy—in order to oppress. Through a lens of critical literacy, Gilead constructs its discourse in order to shape the women into the handmaids it desires and require, while the handmaids use literacy to resist, to “challenge the status quo in an effort to discover alternative paths for self and social development.” When Offred sees Moira carving “Aunt Lydia Sux” into the wooden stall at the Red Center, she chastises her: “If they catch you writing, you’ll lose a hand. It’s not worth it.” The regime’s “eye for an eye” (hand for an offense with the hand) discourse has succeeded in shaping Offred, in this moment at least, into a woman who will comply. But Moira will not. She sees a broader meaning and purpose in her act, and so to her it is worth it: “once we get out of here, there’s going to be a girl who comes in here and reads it. It’ll let her know she’s not alone.” While Gilead intends to alter the identity of these modern American women, changing them into compliant handmaids of an unjust system, each one focused just on her own survival, Moira uses her dangerous literacy to assert that they are not what the Commanders and Aunts demand they be; they are a collective, a “we.”

Offred may fear for Moira in this bathroom scene, but later, when she is sentenced by Mrs. Waterford to solitary confinement in her room, she chafes at the lack of choices, at the sense of self Serena Joy seeks to impose on her. As she goes into her tiny closet and lies on the floor, she tells us: “There are things in this room to discover. I am like an explorer to other countries.” The government does all it can to delimit people’s choices, but as humans so often do, Offred finds ways to expand her possibilities, in this case through language, reframing her situation: the Commander’s Wife wants her to feel punished, to be confined; through her words, Offred becomes an expansive explorer. And, because she has opened up this possibility for herself, more language comes in. She finds the words left in a corner of the closet by a former Offred. “It’s a message, for me.” Just as Moira carves a message to let future handmaids know they are not alone, Offred’s predecessor has left her words of support: “Nolite te Bastardes carborundorum.” Unsure of the literal translation, Offred does know what the act means: “You had to be brave to do this, so whatever it means, thank you,” she thinks.

She later finds out from the Commander what it means. It’s schoolboy, incorrect Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” He laughs when he tells her this; to him it is basically meaningless. But to the former Offred, who committed suicide in that closet, the phrase is crucial to pass on to her successor. In her brave act, she appropriates something that is a joke to the boy who became part of the ruling class, and makes it an injunction for survival. As an act of critical literacy, it challenges the status quo and questions the regime’s construction of “handmaid.” Instead of allowing herself to be re-constructed as only a compliant, submissive, reproductive slave, the new Offred can take from the former Offred’s message that a handmaid can retain, hold tightly to something of the self she came to the room with. She does not have to be entirely re-shaped to fit the red-cloaked mold. There is still a “you” that one does not have to allow to be ground down.

While the handmaids engage in a transgressive and critical literacy, the architects and leaders of Gilead enact a repressive literacy. They might argue, reading Ira Shor’s definition of critical literacy, that they are using literacy to redefine selves and “remake society,” to put into place “alternative paths.” After all, their overly literal reading of the Genesis story of Rachel and Bilhah radically redefines the identities and roles of women in their society, who now travel on an alternative path. But, when a group of people uses readings and language to redefine the identities of others against those others’ wills, they are not questioning power relations to empower themselves and others to make the world more “just or humane.” They are imposing their will on others who do not desire this re-writing of their world and existence in it. We see in a flashback to the Red Center that Aunt Lydia—training the handmaids for the Ceremony—pushes a metaphoric understanding of the “ideal” relationship between the handmaid and the wife: “The two of you will become one flesh, one flower waiting to be seeded.” This, of course, is bullshit. In every instance that we see, the relationship between handmaid and wife is adversarial, and for good reason. But, this comes from a simplistic and literal reading of the scripture: Rachel, who has not been able to conceive, says to her husband Jacob, “Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall be upon my knees, that I may also have children by her” (Genesis 30: 3, KJV). The leaders’ literal reading leads to the ridiculous and oppressive system in which the handmaid must be lying on the knees of the wife while her husband is attempting to impregnate her and, if the act is successful, also lie on the wife’s knees while the baby is being born.

One result of this acritical and oppressive literacy is a lack of connection between people who should share one: husbands and wives, any couples in a sexual relationship. The Ceremony in the Waterford household that we see this episode is a failure: the Commander cannot get an erection. He finally leaves and goes to his room, where we see (from the back) that he is masturbating. His wife enters the room, seeking a connection, the sort that they should have with each other. “Let me help you,” she says, kissing him. He accepts her caresses at first, but when she kneels on the floor, ready to provide oral sex, he gently pushes her away, saying, “Don’t.” We hear Offred’s voiceover telling us that she knows she will be blamed for the Ceremony’s failure. “He tried to talk to me before the Ceremony.” “He tried to connect. That’s what he needs.” Yet this world that he constructed, partly through acritical and oppressive readings and withholding of literacy from much of the population, does not enable human connection.

Despite the regime’s best efforts, though, the handmaids often manage to construct forbidden bonds for themselves, in part due to their transgressive, critical literacy: Moira and the unknown women to enter that bathroom stall in the future, the two successive Offreds. One big change to the novel’s story that this episode’s script makes is to have Offred escape the Red Center with Moira. In the book, Moira lures Aunt Elizabeth to the bathroom on her own, attacks her, steals her robe, and chains her up to be found later. Offred only learns of what happened through the grapevine. In this episode, the two friends act out the plot together, but Offred is stopped by security forces, when she and Moira are briefly separated, and is sent back to the Red Center. There she is badly beaten by Aunt Lydia. We see this in a flashback earlier in the episode, but at the end, we see the aftermath: a suffering Offred lies in bed with badly bloodied feet. One by one, the other handmaids come into the dormitory and lay small offerings of food by her side. Offred recalls this after she successfully appeals to the Commander to intervene with his wife to let her outside. The Commander, who would “prefer” her “life to be bearable,” sees to her release from the punishment of being kept inside.

As she walks out of the house, and into the street with a growing number of Handmaids forming a group, the Penguin Café Orchestra’s instrumental “Perpetuum Mobile” plays. It is a fitting song from the animated film “Mary and Max,” also about an unexpectedly strong connection forged between two highly unlikely characters who become long-distance pen pals. Mary and Max’s literacy joins them across continents, and the handmaid’s literacy helps join them, despite how the regime would like to keep them separate. As Offred walks, she thinks about her predecessor, “She helped me find my way out. She’s dead. She’s alive. She’s me. We are the handmaids. Nolite te Bastardes carborundorum, bitches.”