Handmaids Tale, Use of Space, and the Flower Children
(This post contains some spoilers from episodes 1-5 of the second season of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”)
--“Our Father, who art in heaven. Seriously? Is that Fenway? I’ve been there! What the actual fuck?!”
(Offred, Season Two, Episode One, with a bit of me on the Red Sox home thrown in)--
As difficult as much of the first season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was to watch, I at least felt confident in the broad arc of the season’s plot since I know the book well. I recognized much of what would befall Offred and could say what wouldn’t. In season two, however, all bets are off (except I figure they won’t kill her). The creators of the show lead us off the broad path of the novel for this second season exploration of what might happen to Offred and others in Gilead after she’s whisked away in that black van; and, it’s all making me damned anxious. So, I looked for some interesting small threads to follow through the painful and depressing fabric that is this first half season. One such thread is what they do with the landscape of the former Boston area. Viewing Gilead’s appropriation of important spaces in this place so central to the founding of the former United States is telling of the regime’s intentions, and hints at some commentary on our current US.
Appropriation One: That is Fenway Park in that early first episode scene, and the Powers That Be in Gilead have transformed this iconic baseball arena into a space to “play with” resistant handmaids. Where once the likes of Babe Ruth, Carlton Fisk, Ted Williams, and David Ortiz played America’s favorite pastime to the delight and frustration of thousands of fans, worried about the Curse of the Bambino until Theo Epstein came along, the Commanders’ sadistic Aunt Lydia and Guardians have constructed a site of gallows. The enjoyment of life is replaced by the fear of death as black-clad, dog-wielding Guardians herd the handmaids who refused to stone Janine to what looks like their deaths by hanging. But, psych! A hangman pulls the lever that will open the floor beneath the red-robed, crying women, yet they do not swing. Just like a baseball game that looks to be lost can shift in the 9th inning with the other team’s suddenly bad pitching or fielding, the handmaids are given a new shot at life. “Let this be a lesson to you,” Aunt Lydia intones, after revising scripture so that it says what she—and the regime—wants it to say: “Ye shall love the lord your god with all your heart . . . shall obey . . . or feel the pain of his judgment. For that is his love.” When Jesus revised the Deuteronomy passage, he added a bit about loving thy neighbor as thyself. Sort of what the handmaids did when refusing to murder Janine. But, the god of Jesus is not the god of Gilead, and the “games” of this regime are seriously messed up. They are in power now, have all the control, and the wages of “sin” against them can be death—or at least terrorizing fear of it.
Appropriation Two—and then Re-Appropriation: the offices of The Boston Globe. After her assisted escape from the medical office, one of the sites to which June is taken by a Mayday volunteer is a huge, dark, warehouse-type building. At first it is not clear what this place is or was. The remnants of cubicles are in one large space, papers flung chaotically everywhere, the residue of office workers’ lives visible here and there: a family photo, a small Pride flag, a woman’s shoe. Blood is spattered, and one wall is riddled with bullets. June terms it a “slaughterhouse,” but we soon see the battered logo of The Boston Globe on a wall. The home of a free press, a newspaper likely critical of the new revolution as it was in progress, would have to be destroyed, of course. A place where people methodically searched for the truth of what was going on in the world and were constitutionally-protected in the expression of their informed opinions would need to become a place of chaos and screams of terror as investigative journalists were eventually silenced. A place in which gay people and straight women could work would have to be darkened, turned into a tomb, for rainbow flags cannot exist in a world of “gender traitors.” Pride and treachery are not compatible. An office dedicated to the purpose of shedding light on world events is appropriated for darkness. Office space celebrating family and representing various identities must be appropriated for conformity. Once the firing squad came through, all were the same in death.
Yet, the regime—pretenders to Truth—abandoned this place. And, it became re-appropriated by Mayday as a safe space for a pregnant handmaid. And, June works to make it her own in the two months that she is there. She boxes up workers’ artifacts and creates a shrine on and below the bullet-ridden wall, adding to it bit by bit until it stands as a testament to the truth of what occurred there. She lights candles and offers a prayer, demonstrating a very different sort of religious spirit than Aunt Lydia: “Please send your holy angel to watch over this place. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
She also uses the building as her personal gym, running every day to strengthen her body and become more fit. When Nick visits, they have sex. She has the ability to care for and have authority over her own body now, after being freed from the Commander’s, Serena Joy’s, and Aunt Lydia’s control. This building is a safe space for her to do this. Unlike Fenway Park, this is a space for a woman, no longer for the terrorizing of women.
Appropriation Three: universities. We see where Emily worked as a microbiologist, teaching and researching at a university. Yet the new regime is taking over and her dean wants her out of the classroom so that she—a married lesbian—is not so visible. He has taken the photos of his male lover off of his desk. “They can’t scare us back into the closet,” Emily protests. Yet soon after, she is horrified to find that they can do worse than that. The regime has appropriated one of the halls of learning to impart its own lesson: her soft-spoken, worried boss and friend is hanging in front of a building with the word “FAGGOT” spray-painted near him.
Gilead has also appropriated one of the walls of Harvard to hang bodies to “teach” lessons. Once June is re-captured, Aunt Lydia is hell-bent to turn her back into Offred. One “class session” is held in front of this wall, on which hangs the body of the secretly Muslim man who hid June in his apartment for a while, as she was hopefully making her way to Canada. In her red robe, she falls to the ground, tormented by what has happened to him. Lydia thrusts her catechism questions on June: “Who killed him? Answer me, please.“ “I did.” “Why did god allow such a terrible thing to happen?” “To teach me a lesson.” And, June seems to learn. Aunt Lydia hugs her. “June consorted with terrorists. Not Offred. Offred was kidnapped. . . . She is free from blame . . . [and] does not have to bear June’s guilt.” From a place that students could learn about a wide-range of topics, learn to think critically, learn about who they are, Gilead wrests spaces to “teach” through terror, to modify and narrow thinking, and to impose new identities that are beneficial to them.
Appropriation Four: The Colonies. I’ll end with a more positive one. Despite the Gileadean regime’s torturous, draconian methods of “re-education” and “persuasion,” people are not as malleable as Gilead would like. Resistance happens in myriad ways, small and large, as handmaids employ spaces in ways their overlords do not intend. I’ll save the biggest one we see, in episode 6, for later, and now focus on what happens with the “un-women” in the “colonies.” These are the spots in North America that were the worst hit by the environmental degradation the pre-Gilead Americans wrought. If it was like our real U.S., the most marginalized citizens--people of color and poor Americans--lived where the most toxic pollution was generated and spilled. Now, in Gilead, the most marginalized—the “un-women,” those who don’t conform to the regime’s idea of “femininity”—live and work and die there, trying to salvage something for the government to re-take. But, we also see those condemned to work unto death re-taking, re-appropriating, something for themselves. The residents there—lesbians, a rabbi, a handmaid who tried to take control of her baby—care for each other. Emily administers medicine, even when it is hopeless. This is an act of resistance. She administers poison in the guise of medicine to the unfaithful Commander’s wife who shows up. This is an act of punishment, revenge, and resistance: “Every month, you held a woman down while your husband raped her. Some things can’t be forgiven,” she tells the woman in episode 2. They hang the Wife’s corpse on a makeshift cross.
But, another, positive form of resistance takes over in episode 5, with the ever-optimistic Janine. This episode features a back-and-forth between the Colonies and the Commanders’ world, and we are shown two very different weddings. Serena Joy and Offred attend a Prayvaganza (even Serena laughs at the name: “not one of the Commanders’ better efforts, if you ask me”), at which a number of Guardians, including Nick, are married to young teenaged girls. The ceremony is replete with Genesis injunctions to “bring forth children” “in sorrow.” Meanwhile, in the Colonies, when one of the women is close to death, Janine arranges for a wedding between her and her love. The rabbi presides, and the toxic colonies—intended as a place of Christian punishment for non-conforming women—are re-appropriated with Hebrew prayers for Kit and Fiona at a same-sex wedding. In this wedding, the two participants love each other.
Emily disapproves. “This place is hell, and covering it up with flowers isn’t going to change anything,” she snaps at Janine. “Kit’s going to die happy,” Janine retorts. “You’re covering up the slaughterhouse for them,” Emily shoots back. “Cows don’t get married,” is Janine’s final thought. The next time we see the Colonies, Kit has died. Janine reminds me of the transgressive Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, who covers the body of Rue with flowers in a clear shot against the Capitol’s intention that the children always view each other as enemies. Here, Janine places flowers on Kit’s body. Jewish prayers follow her into the ground. The toxic, deadly Colonies are re-appropriated as a space of love, honor, and self-expression.
These lowest of all Gilead’s inhabitants demonstrate that the mind, the heart, and the soul cannot so easily be colonized.
