Handmaid's Tale 2

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Serena Joy stood out to me as an interesting character that greatly exemplified the role of women in Gilead. She was an advocate of “traditional” values where a woman stays in the home and she also played a key role in the establishment of Gilead and its government. She, however, seems bitter at the achievement of these goals. Now, instead of traveling across the country speaking on her beliefs, she is now forced to stay in the home. The reader almost feels sympathy for her situation because not only has she lost her power in society and has been reduced to an unimportant housewife, but she also has to watch her husband try to impregnate another woman. She, not her husband, has to bear the embarrassment of being unable to produce children and as a result a strange woman has to come into her house and have sex with her husband in hopes of reproducing. She is bored and seen as useless in the eyes of the law. It is a sympathetic situation, but at the same time, the reader is acutely aware that it is because of her own firm beliefs that she is in this position. Nonetheless, there was a moment where I felt a flicker of pity for this woman.

However, Serena Joy loses all sympathy from the reader when she takes out her anger and frustration on Offred. She becomes one of the crueler characters in the novel when she arranges for Offred to have sex with Nick in order for her to have a baby. She tempts Offred into the arrangement by offering to show her a picture of Offred’s daughter. She shows that she has known the whereabouts of Offred’s child all along, and has concealed this knowledge from the other woman. Yet, she cruelly used this information to exploit and manipulate Offred. She wanted Offred to have a child so that she could raise it as her own, and she used the fact that Offred was suffering from the loss of her own child to get what she wanted.

The social order of Gilead worked because women like Serena Joy were willing to control and manipulate other women like Offred. Serena Joy, and other women in her position, see the cruel way that their own lives have turned out, yet they do not see that the other women are suffering just as much, if not more than, they are. The government of Gilead counts on this behavior in order to control women. Even though she is not fertile and cannot be used as a tool to reproduce, her pitiless and selfish behavior allows her to be used as a tool to hold together this totalitarian government. The character of Serena Joy shows how women willingly allowed themselves to be treated as subhuman means of achieving goals in Gilead society.