Divided into five brief chapters, this segment relates the controlling theme of Atwood’s novel: the sterility and coercion of a circumscribed and enforced notion of womanhood. Because Offred’s mind longs for stimulation, she wards off the boredom of incarceration by playing word games, twisting “Waste not want not” into an exercise in logic: “If I am not being wasted, why do I want?” In an existential brain stretcher, she declares, “I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight,” yet the warm rays fail to penetrate to the chilled soul that doubts the future and longs for news of mother, husband, and daughter. Displaying a sliver of defiance against the dictatorship that has robbed her of family and freedoms, Offred refuses to think of her cell as “my.”
The persistent color motif suggesting menstruation and the female cycle resounds in the blatant scarlet color of the Handmaid’s uniform, Serena’s voluptuous tulips, and the blood spots on the hoods of executed doctors. To Offred, the blood color “defines us.” Curiously, Offred’s name suggests both “of Fred” and “off red,” a hint of her rebellion against authoritarianism. Like a venturesome Little Red Riding Hood in a forest of preying beasts, she steps out of the Commander’s protective walls into the streets, her only armament a shopping basket. The ambiguity of Offred’s position in Gilead is reflected in society’s unresolved conflict of interests. As a treasured future mother, she enjoys a bland, but nutritious diet and the constant vigilance of guards, who protect her sexual integrity at the same time they prevent her from taking a subway into the city. As a potential failure, she lives under a sword of Damocles, an unnamed punishment that will fall on her after three years of failed attempts to conceive. Thus, the Handmaid journeys an ambiguous walkway, both “path through the forest” and “carpet for royalty.”
