Valuing Life? Reflections on “Orphan Black,” The Handmaid’s Tale, and Harry Potter

Recently, I posted about connections I draw between “Orphan Black” and The Handmaid’s Tale. This week, I’ve been sadly anticipating the series finale for the clones and reading new Harry Potter scholarship to prep for my upcoming class, prompting more thoughts on connections between all of these works. While the similarities between the corporate and religious entities’ control of women’s lives and reproduction in “Orphan Black” and the religious government’s control of the same in Margaret Atwood’s world may be more obvious, Voldemort’s obsession with the narrow parameters of physical life and doing all he can to ensure his eternal, tenuous hold on his body and DNA tie him in important ways to the Commanders in Handmaid’s Tale, and Henrik and Neolution leaders in “Orphan Black.”

The Commanders of Gilead, the leaders of the Proletheans and Neolution in the world of “Orphan Black,” and J.K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort all engage in spiritual, scientific, and/or magical means to draw to themselves a power over life that does not—and should not—belong to them. This theft of power spits in the face of modern ethical norms of self-determination, defense of the rights of others, and respect for life as expansive, meaningful, and free. They do all of this while claiming to be pro-life. Yet their notions of life are very narrow, reduced only to a focus on procreation and biology, which tears from women--and some men--their rights to freely determine their own paths in life and live meaningfully, and tears from others their very physical lives. Through exploring all of this in fictional worlds, the writers can help us understand our own world and lead us to question how we want to understand life and rights within it.

In Gilead, the Commanders—faced with widespread infertility in the population, including in their own marriages—appropriate the bodies of the fertile women, pressing them into service as handmaids, a new societal role derived from the biblical story of Jacob, Rachel, and Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah. They do, as Offred points out, offer the women a choice, which can make it seem to the men as if they are valuing others’ humanity. “There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some,” she tells us, “and this is what I chose” (94). But, as feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye has argued, these sorts of choices still constitute coercion, for coercion—by Frye’s reasonable definition—is not the presence of only one possible action. It is the offer of more than one bad option, with the least terrible one being the action the coercer wants taken. Fertile women in Gilead can become handmaids, be sent to the thoroughly environmentally degraded Colonies to clean up toxic spills before dying from them, or be killed outright. Their choice. Becoming a handmaid can seem—to many—to be the “best” option. But, that does not mean that it is a role they would have constructed for themselves. Instead, they are constructed by the men in power, through an abuse of stories, an abuse of scripture.

Instead of comporting themselves as actual followers of what is written in the bible they profess to revere, the Commanders alter the texts to suit their purposes. One example is their change to the Beatitudes, Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Offred relates her memory of lunch time at the Red Center where she was in training to become a handmaid. They were made to listen to a tape: “Blessed be the poor in spirit . . . Blessed be the meek. Blessed are the silent. I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking” (89). People’s silence is useful to the regime, so—like a magical incantation—they weave that into the bible passage. It’s a way of asserting control; a way of signaling that they, not the Christian tradition, are the ultimate authority, yet not being SO obvious that they can’t pretend that they aren’t abusing power.

But, abusing power is decidedly what they are about. They piously claim to be doing it for the cause of life—procreation--yet the fact that they murdered the entire U.S. Congress to gain power belies their pro-life claim. Their willingness to execute and otherwise kill dissidents also puts the lie to their professed concern for life. One of the stories the Commander reads each Ceremony evening is that of God telling Adam to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (88), as if to say that all they want to do is to fulfill God’s commandment and promote life, right? Except in their world, where environmental toxicity led to reduced fertility, this promotion of basic biologic life—reproducing humans—comes into conflict with women’s rights not only to choose whether, when, and with whom to procreate, but also to fulfilled, meaningful lives. While in biblical times, women didn’t have the right to such choices, and human rights weren’t understood as they are now, in today’s modern, Western world, choice is an important and fundamental component of basic human dignity and existence.

Since the Enlightenment, ideas of human identity have evolved to include self-determination and self-construction—although also subject to social construction and systemic forces beyond any individual’s control. To so thoroughly control Handmaids’ every waking moment, their actions, their dress, their wombs is to claim for themselves a power that ought not be theirs. The erasure of Handmaids’ identities is symbolized by the regime’s naming of them: no longer possessors of individual names, the women are now “Of their Commander’s name.” Ofglen, Ofwarren, Offred are not names, but brands, which—along with their red robes and white headgear—mark them as the property of a specific, named man. Under threat of torture, death, or the Colonies, the women will conform. All in service to an extremely narrow understanding of “life.”

Though in many ways a very different sort of story, the Harry Potter series highlights these issues. A post-Enlightenment understanding of human identity is central to the series, articulated by Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who tells Harry—worried that he might actually be a Slytherin—that “it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are” (Chamber of Secrets 333). Yet to the series’ villain, Lord Voldemort, a wizard’s blood status is central to his or her identity. His movement is about pureblood wizards gaining supremacy, despite the fact that his father was a Muggle, not a wizard. And, in his pursuit of absolute power, the choices and self-determination of others is of no concern to him. While the Gilead regime uses its “incantations” of doctored biblical passages as a partial means to their ends, Voldemort uses the Imperius curse to bend others’ actions to his will; while the Commanders’ narrow understanding of life is centered on procreation, Voldemort’s is focused on merely his physical immortality. His life need have no particular meaning beyond his quest for power. He just wants not to be “weak,” like the mother he deplores for dying. Others’ lives have no meaning or value to him. He commits murder seven times to create horcruxes to hold pieces of his soul, in attempts to ensure that he will never fully die.

As the Gilead regime turns women into nameless objects, merely repositories for their valued wombs, Voldemort objectifies his soul, by breaking it into pieces held by literal objects: a diary, a ring, a goblet, etc. Neither cares for life lived healthily, expansively, with rights and with meaning; they merely care for the fact of biological life. And, like the architects of Gilead, Voldemort will trample on anyone who gets in the way of his quest for power: witness the Magic Is Might sculpture that is installed in the Ministry of Magic once he assumes power in Deathly Hallows: “a gigantic statue of black stone dominated the scene . . . this vast sculpture of a witch and a wizard sitting on ornately carved thrones” (198), but looking closely at it, Harry realizes “that what he had thought were decoratively carved thrones were actually mounds of carved humans: hundreds and hundreds of naked bodies, men, women, and children, all with rather stupid, ugly faces, twisted and pressed together to support the weight of the handsomely robed wizards” (199).

The scientists of “Orphan Black” can seem like a liberal opposite of the conservative Gilead leaders: they are explorers, willing to go boldly into the future; and some of them are women. There is a long history of some women joining forces with some men to oppress other women. (And Virginia Coady and the work on and with Castor clones, as well as Susan Duncan’s relationship with Ira, are other interesting, related but different, issues to explore another time). Early on we see a range of choices that Neolution offers individuals in the form of body alterations, like tails; they seem to be expanding horizons, not constricting them like the Commanders. Yet, in their success at human cloning, they create over 200 copies of the first Leda, and then see these girls and women as theirs to control: limited self-awareness, monitors who seem like friends or lovers. They are objects to the scientists, given numbers, their DNA patented. They are only useful for the scientific knowledge and the cures that their genetic material can lead to.

Tomas is a religious fanatic, who sees the clones as demonic abominations and trains Helena to hunt them down and assassinate them, at first not realizing that it is her sisters she is demanded to kill. Henrik claims more religious enlightenment, wanting his religion to be based in science, but he completely objectifies the clones and other women, too. He recruits what his daughter, Gracie, comes to call “brood mares” to be impregnated; the resulting children are all dressed the same, warehoused in a home, taught the story of Frankenstein. When he discovers that Sarah is fertile and suspects her twin might also be, he captures Helena, harvests her eggs against her will, inseminates them with his sperm, and then implants the fertilized eggs into her womb, all in a makeshift medical room in a barn, to heighten the “brood horse” metaphor. For him, as for the Commanders, the conception of “life” is very narrow, merely conception and gestation. He grandiosely claims that “to multiply is divine.”

While Dyad and the Neolutionists do not claim a religious basis for their actions, they too are obsessed with the biological basics of life and—as we find out in Season Five—in prolonging the life of P.T. Westmoreland, a man who—not unlike Voldemort—has wrapped his origins and identity in mythology to gain the adherence and near-worship of his followers. While Henrik does profess belief in a god whom he wishes to be like, the Neolution scientists--particularly Susan Duncan and Virginia Coady—seemingly worship P.T. Those of Dyad, like Ferdinand and the investors, are largely in it for the money. To them, he clones truly are commodified.

These stories all raise questions about control over women’s lives and reproductive capacities to serve religious, governmental, or profit-making ends and to extend the lives and legacies of the men in power. P.T. strives after life’s mysteries to gain a fountain of youth; like Voldemort, he wants to live forever. Dyad leaders like Leakey and Ferdinand are after glory and riches, the Commanders are after power and a growing population to wield it over, and Voldemort is after immortality and power. They all—like some religious and political leaders in our world--demonstrate a very narrow conception of what life actually is. Engaging with the powerful stories of these books and shows can lead us to see our own world—and what we would like or not like it to be—in new ways.