Down the Rabbit Hole
Season One, Episode Eight: “Jezebel’s”
Just one of the things I love about Handmaid’s Tale, the book, is the way Offred stops her narration at various points to reflect on her act of telling a story, to express her awareness that stories are all constructions of experience. And so, I really like that this episode is book-ended by this feature.
At the very beginning, we hear Offred distance herself from her story, almost as if she is watching someone else’s. While sitting on Luke’s bed, she tells us, “I wish this story were different. I wish it showed me in a different light.” She is still dealing with the news that Luke is alive, but “fading,” while she is in a sexual relationship with Nick. She applies her values and mores from The Time Before to this world and life where those guideposts are virtually meaningless: “I became more faithless.” She feels guilt from this, not surprisingly, but what does it—can it—mean to be faithful in Gilead? This is a place that stole her from her husband and child, declared her marriage null and void, and devised a system in which she is to have sex with another woman’s husband each month, while lying on that woman’s lap. When that system fails to make her pregnant, the wife arranges for her to have sex with another man who might be fertile. Sexual fidelity has become an absurd idea.
But, while the “rules” around sex have changed in the new world, the reasons for it have not. It is officially only for procreation. Yet, Offred acknowledges that for her, when with Nick, it is for pleasure and for comfort/companionship: “I could say these [trysts with Nick] are acts of rebellion, a fuck-you to the patriarchy. Those are excuses; I’m here because it feels good, and because I don’t want to be alone.” Finally, to Offred’s surprise, she discovers that even in this pseudo-religious world, one of the other old reasons for sex is still motivating many of these ultra-conservative men: their fantasies and their construction of women as objects. The so-called oldest profession has not died out, even in Gilead.
In a country built on rigid moral rules that are purportedly “Christian,” any deviation from them on the part of the men in charge would have to issue forth from excellent reasons, right? What more excellent reason for a bunch of alleged bible-devotees than the one used early in its first book, Genesis: the woman made me do it. That’s basically Adam’s line when God asks him why he ate of the fruit from the tree of good and evil. When the Commanders set up their “little club,” as Waterford refers to the large brothel to which he takes Offred for illicit sex, they name it ‘Jezebel’s,’ after the pagan queen of the Hebrew king Ahab. She is credited, in the book of Kings, with luring Israel away from worship of Yahweh to the worship of the gods of her country of origin. Because of a scene in which she makes herself up to wait for her deceased husband’s successor, some Christian traditions see her as a prototype for a “loose woman.” Naming the sex club after her allows these fundamentalist men to continue the tradition of applying biblical names to the various sectors of, and roles in, their new society. If a “jezebel” is a harlot, the name makes sense. But, at a deeper level, it also shows their desire to relinquish responsibility for their actions. A seductive woman led Ahab’s court away from its responsibilities to God, why not here, too? As the Commander responds to Offred’s question about how such a place could exist in Gilead: “Everyone’s human, after all.”
Well—not everyone. The men are human. The women are things to be used. “Contraband,” as the Commander tells Offred as they sneak in. I love that as the two of them stride in through the back door, Grace Slick is singing “White Rabbit.” Offred truly is down the rabbit hole, where everything is crazy. When she asks Waterford, “Who are these people?” he responds that they are business people, foreign visitors…. “I meant the women,” she says to his surprised take. He has to recalibrate for a second to take in the idea that she sees the women as people. He first says that some of them were “working girls,” often a euphemism for “prostitutes.” But, then he goes on to clarify that the woman over there was a sociologist, and they have lawyers and other professionals… “We’ve got quite a collection.” In other words, those women who would not conform to the idea of women as objects, as beings submissive to men. So, in this version of the world, they are the ultimate things to submit to whatever acts a powerful human male desires. As Offred is walking down the hall of the bedroom wing of the former hotel, she hears all manner of screams—not the kind that typically emerge from pleasure—and comes upon a man in the elevator licking his prostitute all up and down her arm. The woman doesn’t even pretend to be having fun.
While this is all bizarre to Offred and she almosts visibly cringes as the Commander keeps stroking her bare skin, she is ecstatic to find Moira alive here: Moira, the ultra-rebellious lesbian, a prime example of a woman who would not submit to any man’s idea of what she should be. Now she is a “thing,” too. Though, not really. She still has her spunk, and Offred—who had been feeling so alone—has someone important again. They get to meet and talk a bit in the bathroom, while Moira is on her break. As they part, they hug fiercely. “I love you, okay?” “Me too. So fucking much.”
This seems to buoy Offred up. She becomes insistent upon not being alone. The next morning, Nick—who drove the car to Jezebel’s—is not speaking to her. When she confronts him, he says he wants to discontinue their relationships because it’s too dangerous. “You could end up on the Wall.” “But, at least someone will care when I’m gone,” she replies. “That’s something. That’s something.”
When Serena Joy returns from a visit to her mother, she brings Offred a gift: a music box she had as a child. It has a key, and when opened, a ballerina spins to a song from Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet.” It leads Offred to her final reflection on story-telling, this time not distancing herself from the story she constructs, but using it to strengthen her conviction not to be alone, and not to allow herself to be constructed by others. We see her in her closet, where she had found the prior Offred’s message. This time, she is the message-carver. Using the key from the music box, she scratches into the wall: “You are not alone.” And, she tells us about what Serena Joy has brought her:
“A girl trapped in a box. She only dances when someone else opens the lid, when someone else winds her up. If this is a story I’m telling, I must be telling it to someone. There’s always someone, even when there’s no one. I will not be that girl in the box.” As the camera pulls away, we see how narrow the space of the closet is. She is in a fairly confined box. But, she’s not dancing. She’s scowling, as chilling instrumental music, with a pulsing bass plays.
