"Burning Down the House"
"Handmaid's Tale," Season Three, Episodes One-Three (Spoilers)
At the end of “Useful,” the third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Season Three, June speaks a line that comes from Margaret Atwood’s novel: “Mother, wherever you might be, you wanted a women’s culture. Now there is one. It isn’t what you meant. But, it exists.” In these first three episodes of this season—released all at once by Hulu last week—the theme of gendered power struggles emerges as a central one. Some Gileadean women claim their right to make choices, dare to stage conflict with the men, and form the sort of nascent women’s culture that might please June’s radical feminist mother of the Time Before. The Commanders must reassert their much more powerful authority, while the women speak out—verbally and through other means—to assert theirs, despite the danger exemplified by the bodies of Marthas swinging from above as the Handmaids walk in pairs to the grocery store. The most striking examples of these power struggles are between June and Commander Lawrence and between Serena and Fred Waterford.
The first episode, “Night,” begins where Season 2 left off: June is running down a road in the rain, her sturdy leather boots pounding the concrete as she leaves the car taking Emily and Nicole away from Gilead. Her newfound conviction and sense of power, forged from the self-determining move of making a CHOICE, gather strength as she talks through what she has done—first to God and then to her infant daughter: “I have reasons. There are always reasons. I’m sorry, Baby Girl, Mom has work.” A woman in Gilead choosing her work is most definitely not what the regime has in mind. When she soon comes upon Lawrence, he asks her, “Are you insane?” She tells him that she can’t leave without her older daughter. “You can,” he says. “I won’t.” To push him to take her to the McKenzies’, where Hannah now lives, she reminds him how he has transgressed: “They could put you on the wall. Even a Commander.” “Spunky,” Lawrence observes. And does as she asks. This lays out the first gendered power struggle and what struck me as the big mystery of the beginning of the season: what’s up with Joseph Lawrence, and what motivates him? Why is he helping handmaids escape and taking June to see her stolen daughter?
June is trying to figure out the same thing. Is he operating out of a sense of guilt and a conscience? But, as the three episodes gather momentum, the possibility of a benevolent motivation behind June’s new Commander’s actions appears to dim. He likes Emily, admires her intelligence, and thinks she might somehow prove useful to the world so lets her get out; he allows the Marthas to stage parts of their operation in his house because “you have to let the rabble rousers blow off a little steam.” Yet, he also berates a Martha for having a stained dress because she’s sopping up wine that he spilled onto the floor, and instructs June to bury the body of the shot Martha with the objectifying order to “clean it up.” He humiliates June at a meeting of Commanders after observing that women can be “fun.” Lawrence, at this point, strikes me not as guilt-ridden or sometimes compassionate, but as thoroughly capricious; he engages in these seemingly disparate actions as a way to assert just how powerful he is and just how powerful he gets to be--simply because he is a man. He does what he does—whether helping someone or harming someone—because he can. Because he is an architect of the society. In Gilead, the rules are made by the Commanders, not for them.
He makes “logical” and “rational” choices about who dies, who lives, who gets to go where, all based upon his metric of Use. June posits that he is feeling guilty about how his spreadsheets turned out to be actual human beings; she wants him, it seems, to be capable of such a human emotion. But he sets her straight: “How tempting it is to invent a humanity for anyone at all,” he tells her, as they discuss his “binders full of women,” most of whom will get sent to the Colonies to die, but five of whom can be plucked to serve as Marthas. He reveals that their humanity is meaningless to him. His plan to make the planet habitable again for children like June’s daughter and to repopulate it is based on a series of equations, not concern for people, and certainly not concern for women as people. His rubric for who is deserving of being a mother also has to do with his notion of usefulness: Mrs. McKenzie is worthy because she made care packages for orphans, a useful activity; June is not worthy because she had an affair, married a previously married man, and worked an outside job editing “esoteric books” rather than be with her child at all times. None of these things are useful to him, so she loses her daughter to the useful Mrs. McKenzie. Interestingly, unlike most others in power in Gilead, he does not quote the bible to argue against adulterous relationships and for women’s traditional roles. It’s about his own category of “use” and his consultation of Darwin’s Descent of Man.There’s a “scientific,” “rational” reason behind all he does.
Yet June will have none of it. She refuses, at first, to choose which five women are spared the Colonies, telling him she will not be a party to the regime’s actions. None of them deserve to die, she spits at him. Yet later, she reconsiders. Not because she buys into his project, and not because she is a submissive Handmaid, but because she comes to see that her choice of new Marthas—women who can fit into the Martha resistance network—could actually be useful. There’s a rationality to her choice of an IT specialist, a lawyer, an engineer, a journalist, and a thief. But, it’s a rational choice in the service of a humanitarian project—defeating Gilead. She does this because she cares, and is anything but capricious. This trilogy of episodes ends as it begins—with June and Joseph squaring off in gendered confrontation.
(The big question I now have about Lawrence is one that Aunt Lydia shares—how appalling to have to admit I share something with Aunt Lydia: what is wrong with Mrs. Lawrence? She tells June, “You can let me know if something unseemly is going on with him.” Last season I thought that he seemed to care about his wife, always referring to her as “my love.” Do I remember correctly that she was an academic before Gilead? Now I’m wondering what “unseemly” thing is happening, if he’s slipping her something to keep her in the state she is in. He puts pills on the tray of tea to be carried to her room. Are they a drug she actually needs or something he gives her to keep her weakened?)
Meanwhile, in June’s former household, Serena and Fred engage in their own dramatic power struggle. He is stunned when she comes in after the baby has disappeared and refuses his order to call 9-1-1. He wonders what she has done, and she tells him, “I did what was best for my child” (not “our” child). When June is returned, he sees that the two women were in on this together. At first, they fight: “You killed my baby,” Serena shrieks at June, lunging at her violently. June grabs onto Serena as she vents her own pain: “I have another daughter. You chased us in the woods and ripped her away from me. And she screamed. My baby screamed. I hope it feels like that!” But then she relents and soothes Serena: “She’ll be okay. She’s free.” The two women are a unit at this point, with a shared understanding of what it means to be okay that is diametrically opposed to Fred’s understanding of okay. Later, as Fred talks to Serena, he tries to re-establish the order he sees as proper, with him above his wife and handmaid. But, Serena tells him, “You don’t need to protect me.” “I’m protecting this house,” he replies. God made me master of an incredible woman.” But, Serena wants him to know she will not be mastered. She made the independent choice to send the baby away. “I drove you to desperation,” he almost pleads as he tries to regain his footing. But, Serena is acting on her own now, not as a proper wife.
Her next act casts her in the role of a vengeful god, with shades of the “madwoman in the attic” at Thornfield Hall and Carrie White at her ill-fated prom springing to mind. But while Serena is angry, she is not mad, nor is she out of control of her powers. She very purposely takes the solution meant for cleaning the stub on her hand where her husband had her finger chopped off, pours it on her marital bed/site of Gilead’s most sacred “Ceremony,” and sets a fire. Then she and June leave the house. June asserts the vengeful god interpretation of the fire-setting, citing from 2 Thessalonians 1. She speaks from memory, so doesn’t get it exactly right: “Lord Jesus, be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire, he shall take his vengeance.” Then she adds her decidedly unbiblical coda, “Burn, motherfucker, burn,” as she stares up at the house (of which Fred is the unfortunate holder) in which she was so horribly oppressed. The actual verses 7 and 8, from the King James Version of the Bible, are: “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
June’s reference to this passage suggest her—and I think Serena’s—take on this act. It is vengeance for the Commander and this society following their perverted version of the biblical teachings, rather than the actual gospel. Serena is daring to pass judgment on her husband and the whole enterprise that she helped to create. She has come to read it differently, she who is not allowed to read and was injured as punishment for doing so. This is her strongest challenge of her husband and assertion of her right to be.
The regime’s interpretation seems to follow in the choice of song that plays after June’s invocation of divine wrath. As we see so many of the Commander’s artifacts of literacy (Scrabble board, books, papers) burn, Bob Geldof sings “Tell me why/I don’t like Mondays...” The song refers to Brenda Ann Spencer’s sociopathic explanation for why she shot up the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego in 1979, killing two adult school employees and injuring eight children. As Geldof once commented, the Boomtown Rats’ song gets at the senselessness of this crime. And, as June reflects in episode 3, as she gazes on the bodies of the hanged Marthas, they hang for heresy, “not for being part of the resistance, because officially there is no resistance. Not for helping people escape, because officially there is no such thing as escape.” And, officially there can be no such thing as a Commander’s Wife enacting vengeance upon him and calling out his heretical interpretation of Scripture. So, it must just be that she burned her bed, burned her house down for something as arbitrary as not liking Mondays.
Gilead and the patriarchy are by no means burned down yet. The Commanders still have the power, but as June muses about these men at the end of episode 3, she lets us know that the women are not done: “We watch them, we please them, we know them that well. We know their nightmares. And that’s what we’ll become one day. Nightmares. And we’re coming for you. Just wait.”
Blessed be the fruit of those nightmares.
