"Speak Wisely"
Season One, Episode Six: “A Woman’s Place”
In a May 17 interview with Vanity Fair, actor Yvonne Strahovski—who plays Serena Joy Waterford—tells Laura Bradley that this episode gave her “an opportunity to expand more on [the Commander’s Wife’s] humanity, which is something that was initially important to me anyway. Because she is so harsh on paper, and I wanted to find her inner emotional struggle within that. . . It was important to me to really try and put her heart in there somewhere.” “Strahovski adds that it’s hard to play a character who is so cold-hearted and self-centered.” I was glad to read that last part, for as intriguing and thoughtful as this episode’s back story was, I still don’t feel bad for the character. What the dramatization of the Waterfords’ history accomplished in this—one of the most chilling episodes so far--is an increasingly complex, three-dimensional pair of characters. They are not just cartoonish villains, but they are still villains of the nastiest and most cruel sort.
Offred’s backstory also serves to draw her more fully: she is not a saint; she was too self- and immediate family-absorbed to pay attention—by her own admission—to what was going on in the world around her. But, she is the victim of the Waterfords and their associates, rendered nearly choiceless. Serena Joy not only bought into, but actively propagated, the stark gender dichotomies of her fundamentalist Christianity. She wrote A Woman’s Place, while not keeping to that place herself. She sat in a movie theater, munching popcorn, while assuring her husband that their planned murder of the entire U.S. Congress, inhabitants of the White House, and the judiciary is just “doing God’s work.” She had powerful choices to make, and she made them. If they mean she now lives in a much more highly constricted world, oh well. She wrote the book. She’s not fully happy? Again, oh, well. Be careful what you wish for next time, M’am, and recognize that you still have it exponentially better than the thousands of women you helped consign to the Colonies, those whose children you ripped away, and those who must endure your brilliant idea of monthly ritualized rape because—as she laid out her idea for a second book to Fred—fertility is a “national resource,” and reproduction is “a moral imperative.”
As it turns out, Serena Joy’s words matter. She made things happen with them—horrifically bad things--so she is in a prime position to know what language can do. This is likely why she instructs Offred to “speak wisely” if the Mexican delegation asks about her life in Gilead. What exactly does it mean to “speak wisely”? Wisdom is usually understood as knowledge stemming from experience; it doesn’t come from books or school, but from reflecting on that experience. In this regard, someone like Serena Joy, who was not a housewife in the time before, doesn’t really have the experience to write wisely about women needing to take on that role as their sole identity. Her book’s injunctions to women to do so come from her ideology, not from experience.
Offred has the experience to develop some “wisdom” on the condition of being a handmaid in Gilead, yet at first doesn’t express it. As with so much of language use in this world, what Serena Joy says to Offred is actually the opposite of what she wants her to do. She wants her to dissemble. And, so at first she does, with some phenomenal subtle acting from Elisabeth Moss.
When the Mexican ambassador asks her if she chose to be a handmaid, Offred pauses painfully, sees the Commander looking at her, and quietly says, “Yes.” When Ambassador Castillo asks, “Are you happy?” Offred grips her hands tightly and casts her eyes down at them. The camera focuses solely on her strained hands for a moment; then Offred says, “I have found happiness. Yes.” When having sex with the chauffeur? When engaging in snarky humor with other shopping handmaids? Any happiness Offred has found is brief and fleeting, but what’s most important here is how she constructs the sentence: she is the subject. Like her imagined journey as an explorer to the closet to discover the former Offred’s message, she imagines herself as a seeker here, too. Anything good that comes from this dystopic situation comes through her constructive agency. Her words do matter.
But, despite being clever here, Offred knows she’s being dishonest and regrets it. She chastises herself when with Nick later: “I said I was happy!” When he tries to minimize this act, tries to lessen her feelings of despair over this lack of integrity, she almost yells at him: “They don’t rape you. He doesn’t come in here once a month, read a little scripture, and stick his cock up your ass. I said I was happy!” What else has she got besides her own personal wisdom to give her a sense of well-being and integrity? So, the next time she sees the ambassador, this woman who came to Gilead to see about trading human beings, she appeals to her, to her sense of herself as a woman, as a human: “I lied to you. This is a brutal place. . . . If we run, they try to kill us. Or worse. . . . They rape me. Every month. Just when I might be fertile.” When the ambassador says she’s sorry, Offred presses her, “I didn’t choose this. They caught me. I was trying to escape. They took my daughter. So, don’t be sorry. . . Please don’t be sorry. Please DO something.”
The ambassador refuses, citing the fact that no baby has been born alive in her city in six years—“My country is dying.” Offred tearfully tells her “My country’s already dead.” She is right. But, her honesty is rewarded with the statement from the ambassador’s aide that Luke is alive. And, he can get a message to him. Her words mattered in a way she didn’t expect.
I look forward to seeing where this leads.
