The Body: Notes on Massolit Video & Chapter 13 Analysis
- We have a tendency to regard our bodies as instruments, or simply as vessels for our minds’ actions – not as the core of being in the way that the women of Gilead have been conditioned to think
- Ch.13: “I sink down into my body as into a swamp. Treacherous ground, my own territory”. Offred’s body is now alien, and is a dangerous/foreign space to her.
- “I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future”. Returns to the motif of time (past/present/future). Here she insinuates that her clock is ticking; the looming threat of being sent to the colonies if she doesn’t bear a child in the near future.
- This is reflective of the totalitarian regime’s control over women’s bodies in the view that such bodies have an expiration date, and that if the body’s function of fertilisation isn’t fulfilled, the human mind that lives inside is considered negligible
- “Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfil the expectations of others, which have become my own.” Idea that fear and failure work hand in hand. Offred wants to succeed in her duty as a ‘walking womb’ as to escape the consequences of not meeting the regime’s expectations
- The passage of time is marked by her time of the month which inevitably brings either failure/despair or success
- “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, of means of transportation… there were limits but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.” Juxtaposition with the past-tense once again, where she reflects on her body once being in sync with her will.
- Present tense: “Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping… Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen… I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”
- It is now her body that takes precedence over her mind through controlling it, not vice versa. She fills the description of her uterus with visual imagery to establish the metaphor of her womb as an earth/universe of its own (embodying great natural forces such as waves and the moon) that endures decay with the passage of time.
- Diction also important here – eg. ‘omen’ connotes foreboding. She is no longer in harmony with her body
- Chapter 16: “One detaches oneself. One describes”. She removes the personal pronoun ‘I’ as it’s too painful to fulfil her duty in the ceremony without taking an objective/impersonal stance
- Workers at Jezebel’s are similarly subject to state rape, as opposed to less sexually attracted women who are sent to the colonies. This reinforces the idea that a woman’s function under this regime is dependent upon the quality of one’s body (whether it be child-bearing or simply for sexual satisfaction)
- Atwood poses an opportunity to reflect on new-right/alt-right ideology in the US. These passages help us question the perceived sanctity of the woman’s body as the ‘giver of life’ (in this case with the Republic of Gilead).
- ‘Pieixoto’s striking comment that Gilead should not be judged too harshly because all such judgments are culturally conditioned echoes, and calls into question, the moral relativism common among academics today’. This plays on the idea of ambivalence, and that in the real world such views on the body aren’t necessarily black & white