"A Little Sweetness in My Soul"

Season One, Episode Five: “Faithful”

This episode’s title begs the question: Faithful to what? Clearly, the Gilead regime demands faithfulness to its laws, policies, and the interpretation of scripture upon which they are based. The resulting system revolves around sex, procreation, and the control of women’s bodies (as do the systems of thought of many fundamentalist and evangelical Christian lawmakers in the United States and fundamentalist Muslim regimes and groups in other parts of the world; the U.S. is not Gilead, of course, but those lawmakers who work to de-fund Planned Parenthood, ban all abortions, ensure that rapists have a say in the development of the fetuses they create, and the raising of the children who might be born as a result of their violence, share a similar outlook with the fictional Commanders). Yet in the breach, Gilead is not all that different from the United States to which its leaders were so morally opposed.

What “Faithful” shows us in its back and forth between Gilead and “before,” is a series of acts of faithlessness. Luke is unfaithful to his wife and—while I assume their marriage has issues, we are not privy to any of them; the script sets no context—appears callous to her feelings. When June says to him during one of their trysts in a hotel, “I want you to leave your wife,” he just says, “Okay.” I am not in favor of people having to stay in unhappy marriages, but there are better and worse ways to extricate oneself from such a union, and from what we are shown of Luke, his actions fall into the latter category. He’s loving to June, and completely thoughtless to Annie.

Yet, while Gilead was purportedly constructed to enforce fundamentalist Christian standards of behavior on all, faithlessness is shown to be the norm there, too. Like Luke, the Commander is unfaithful to his wife—and even more cruel: she is made to be there when her husband has sex with another, and each time the Ceremony occurs, we see the pain on her face. While the Commanders might argue that this infidelity is required in order to be faithful to an even higher injunction: that to “be fruitful and multiply,” Fred is shown also to be unfaithful to the rigid system of rules that the regime has set up. He clearly sees himself as being above the law when he invites his handmaid to his study for games of Scrabble, magazine-reading, and what might pass for conversation. When he first offers Offred a beauty magazine, she says “It’s not allowed.” “It is with me,” he responds. She tells us that she has learned that “he likes it when I flirt,” but the give and take can only go so far. What might feel like a taste of “before,” with parlor games, reading, and repartee, is not really. When the Commander criticizes the magazine Offred is reading for its “lists of made-up problems: no woman was ever rich enough, young enough, pretty enough, good enough” (a justified critique, but it’s a critique of the patriarchal attitudes governing such magazines’ production, and his and his cronies’ “solution” is just patriarchy on steroids), Offred retorts, “We had choices then.” Fred then begins to preach. “Now you have respect. You have protection,” but the strange sexual rituals are an odd form of “respect” for both the Wife who is made to be a partner in her husband’s adultery and the Handmaid who is essentially raped once a month.

It’s not only the Commanders who refuse to keep the rigid rules they created and presumably wanted; the women refuse as well. Serena Joy, one of the proponents of the new regime’s ideology in the months leading up to it, is also unfaithful to the rules. While the system of Gilead is in place for Commanders to impregnate their handmaids, and no man can be deemed sterile, most know that is BS. In the last episode, Offred’s doctor tells her that many of the men have been rendered infertile; in this one, Serena Joy acknowledges to Offred that “maybe he can’t.” Her solution? Sex with the chauffeur. Offred cannot refuse, and worries not only about what might happen to her if she’s caught, but about the fact that Nick may be an Eye. Yet, she has also been attracted to him and wonders “How come this time it feels like I’m cheating on Luke?” But Serena Joy ensures that there will be no pleasure in this encounter either, as she maintains a rigid presence in the room as both Nick and Offred assume the posture of a Commander and Handmaid in the Ceremony on Nick’s very squeaky bed.

While Serena Joy is unfaithful to the letter of Gilead’s law, she is faithful to its spirit (police a woman’s body, ensure that sex is only for procreation, bring about an upswing in the birth rate, make herself a mother at all costs). She is also faithful to at least the passage of scripture that she quotes. While we’ve seen Aunt Lydia leave out important parts of a bible verse or change words, when the Commander’s Wife quotes Jeremiah 1:5, she is accurately reciting the King James Version’s translation of the passage. As Offred is headed back to her room after the arranged sexual encounter with Nick, Serena Joy asks, “How do you feel? Do you feel any different?” An upset and aggravated Offred retorts, “You don’t just feel pregnant thirty seconds after a man comes.” Hurrying to her, Serena Joy says, “I’m sorry; forgive me,” and then recites the bible verse: “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee. And before thou camest out of the womb, I sanctified thee and ordaineth thee a prophet unto the nations.” In Jeremiah, this is meant as encouragement from God to a young and uncertain Jeremiah. “You can be a prophet!” But, it is also used by the pro-life movement as justification for the idea that one’s life and purpose begins at (or before) conception. There are, thus, multiple interesting ways to read the use of this passage in the episode. (It does not appear in the book.)

Is Serena Joy trying to encourage Offred in what she, her husband, and Gilead see to be her destiny—bearing a child for the Waterford family? This would make Mrs. Waterford the god-type figure in the passage; she is god-like with her power to control so much of Offred’s life, but the idea of a female god would be anathema to the staunchly patriarchal Gilead. Also, if she is the god-figure, then Offred is the one ordained a prophet, the person to speak truth to power about all of its abuses. Clearly, this reading is transgressive. The other reading is that like those in some real-world fundamentalist groups, Serena Joy subscribes to the idea that this biblical passage proves that a zygote is a full human being from the second of conception, and so it is perfectly reasonable to think that Offred would feel different immediately. I suspect that the latter would be her conscious intent, but that interesting possibilities are rendered by the subtext.

This passage from Jeremi,h, and the Commander’s reference to “biologic destinies”--echoing Freud and others--center two of the regime’s ideologies in language that is likely meant by them to confer definitive meaning, yet serve to highlight multiple possibilities and contradictions. When the Commander is touting Gilead’s benefits to women, in addition to respect and protection, he claims that now “you can fulfill your biologic destinies in peace.” “Biologic destiny,” Offred says. “Children,” he responds. “What else is there to live for?” She might have retorted, “Yet you took away my child,” but instead chooses to answer his question: What else is there to live for? “Love.” He laughs. “Love isn’t real. It was never anything more than lust, with a good marketing campaign.” Like with so much set up by the theocrats, this is predicated on a literal reading of scripture: God’s injunction in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply.” Looking at this passage in isolation, one could say that it is a prescribed destiny for humans to procreate; that is #1. Love need have nothing to do with it, as for centuries it did not (and in some places where arranged marriages are the norm, it still does not).

‘Biology is destiny’ fits with narrow biblical readings and with Freudian and other more modern worldviews. Yet, the idea of childbearing as a biologic destiny is especially absurd in this dystopic world where most people are infertile. How can having babies be one’s destiny when to do so is impossible? They are hewing to a gender ideology that cannot be fulfilled by those who say it should be. And so, among a group of people for whom sex is so fraught, everything is about sex: policing it, preventing it between some—like Ofglen and her Martha lover—forcing it upon others, creating rigid rules and ceremonies for it, breaking those rigid rules—all to go after the Holy Grail of a pregnancy and a child. But, the world was broken and rendered infertile by the greed of corporate polluters and their enablers, and now the old biologic destiny has also been broken into two: it is the “destiny” of some women only to procreate and that of others only to raise the children. Sex is only for the purpose of procreation.

So, in such a world, Offred’s act of marching alone to Nick’s room for sex is a powerful act of resistance. When her only sex partner is to be her Commander, or a substitute arranged for by her Commander’s wife; when sex is only to be performed on the day of likely ovulation and only under the watchful eye of those in power, Offred determines who—among a limited set of options—her sex partner will be, and more importantly, she does it for pleasure, and for an assurance that June still exists--as the credits roll over Nina Simone’s “Little Sugar in My Bowl”: “I wanna little sugar in my bowl/I wanna little sweetness in my soul…Drop a little sugar in my bowl/ Come on Daddy, save my soul.”