The Madwomen in Gilead: on Being a Wife in Hulu's Dystopia

The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead is a dark world that professes to exalt, honor, and protect women as wives and bearers of children. The regime does pay lip service to the sanctified positions of Wife and Mother, but in actuality rips many women from their spouses and children, forcing them into sexual, housekeeping, and toxic waste clean-up servitude for those in power. Three of the Wives, in particular, offer an instructive look into this role in Margaret Atwood’s imagined theocracy and help make the point about what actually is insane.

In their classic 1979 work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar interpret 19thcentury female writers’ novels. Taking their title from Jane Eyre, the authors posit that these female novelists basically had the dichotomous tropes of angel and monster to draw from when creating their heroines. A woman could either be an angel: submissive, pure, “feminine” by the standards of the time and culture, or a monster: rebellious, “unfeminine,” badly behaving, according to the prevailing standards. Gilbert and Gubar argue that writers like Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen struggled with anxiety over the authority they were claiming. They needed both to adhere to and subvert the angel/monster construction and did so, in part, through creating doppelgangers--pairs of female characters, one of which was angel, the other of which could enact the “monstrous.” Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason are one pair that function this way, as Gilbert and Gubar see it. Margaret Atwood and the TV show writers also employ this angel/monster construction, but are perhaps more successful than women writers over 100 years ago at blurring those boundaries.

Late in Season Two of The Handmaid’s Tale, we are introduced to Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) and his wife, Eleanor (Julie Dretzin), a former art professor “who wanted the world to be beautiful,” but unfortunately had married a man with the power to make it exceedingly ugly and cruel. She is angry, tries to speak against the cruelty, is classified by her husband as “not well,” and is confined by him to her room. At first it seems that he does this in the classic move of labeling a truth-telling woman as insane in order to lock her away. I watched her in her first episode and thought “madwoman in the attic.” As we learn more about Commander Lawrence, though, we see that he might be sincere when he calls her “my love,” and perhaps shuts her up for her safety. Either way, her voice is silenced, and she is a “madwoman in the attic” type character, there to point out what is wrong with the other wives on the show and cry attention to the evils of this theocratic society. She might be seen as “insane” to the regime, but her perspective is the sanest among the wives we have met.

The wife who is most responsible for creating what it means to be an “angel” of a Gilead wife-- and hence also what it means to be the “monster”--is Serena Waterford. Serena is an author of Gilead’s structure and rules, a professional writer and speaker in the time before, who—we learn—believes that it was worth it to sacrifice all of that so she could become a mother by legally stealing another’s baby. She represents what a Gilead wife should be, everything that Eleanor Lawrence would fight against. At least for quite a while, she strives to be. She mouths pious platitudes and quotes from the King James Version of the bible. But, she keeps veering into “monstrosity.” Clearly missing her former life, she takes over writing government orders while her husband is recovering from a gunshot wound, disobeys his orders and brings a female doctor to the hospital to examine the Putnams’/Janine’s baby, and—in the season finale—decides she was wrong about that little rule that females like her daughter shouldn’t read, so stages a revolt at the Commanders’ power meeting. She is punished for her hubris by having part of her hand cut off, similar to how Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester was “punished” for his arrogance by losing his hand in the fire. While in the script, her punishment comes from those in power to bring her down for the bold sin of reading while female, we could also view the punishment as coming from the story’s creators for placing herself above all other women and writing them in to absolute submissiveness. Once Mr. Rochester is brought low, some literary critics maintain, he could be an equal to Jane, paving the way to their egalitarian marriage. To me and some other readers, this plot twist at the end of Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte’s critique of the inequalities of Victorian marriage. Perhaps we can interpret Serena’s loss of an appendage as authorial punishment for, and commentary on, her selling out of other women. Once she suffered the hacking off of her finger, she is in a sense brought down, and engages in an act of solidarity with Offred and the Marthas, those women lower than her on Gilead’s hierarchy. She moves closer to the “mad” from the beginning wife, Eleanor, making blurry the lines between angel and monster.

Finally, Eleanor Lawrence’s true doppelganger might be Nick’s young wife. Eden is the true believer in Gilead; brought up in the system, she strives to be an “angel,” yet she also believes in romantic and marital love. Perhaps she was old enough in the pre-Gilead age to have watched Disney movies and read fairy tales that promise salvation and love from a handsome prince. She expects this from her arranged marriage and wants her “script” to be realized, but her move to a different home reveals to her that the rest of Gilead does not follow along. She works to figure out what Gilead and what a biblical god mean, but her means of understanding: reading and annotating her bible are forbidden. The more she strives to be a good Gileadean wife, the more she veers from the country’s prescribed role, until—like her doppelganger--she goes “mad,” according to the views of the power structure, crossing the angel/monster divide. Fred terms her a “slut,” but she has actually adopted the “heresy” of love. As they drown her for being a heretic (drowning was one typical punishment for the heresy of witchcraft), she recites the famous 1 Corinthians passage on love that is read at many Christian weddings. Notably, she doesn’t use the King James Version translation as Serena always does when quoting the bible. KJV uses the English word “charity,” instead of “love.” She dies a martyr to the love professed in a different part of the bible than Gileadean authorities have ever called upon. Her tragic mistake was in believing that Gilead’s view and hers were the same. So, at the end of her life, she also becomes one of the “mad women of Gilead.”

By maiming one “angel” and killing another, but leaving the “monstrous” madwoman in her attic, the show makes its points about Gileadean “femininity,” the role of Wife, and leaves room for a more interesting path for wives and other women in Season 3.