MOIRA
Moira, always known by her own name because she never becomes a Handmaid, is strongly individual, although she is also a type of the female rebel. This is a position which can be viewed in two ways, and both of them are illustrated here. From Offred's point of view Moira is the embodiment of female heroism, though from the Gileadean authorities' point of view she is a 'loose woman', a criminal element, and her story follows the conventional fictional pattern of such rebellious figures: when Offred last sees her she is working as a prostitute in Jezebel's. Even here, Moira manages to express her dissidence, for she remains a declared lesbian and her costume is a deliberate travesty of feminine sexual allure, as Offred notices when she meets her again on her night out with the Commander. Moira's own wryly comic comment on it is, 'I guess they thought it was me' (Chapter 38).
Moira, too, is a survivor of the American permissive society, a trendy college student who wears purple overalls and leaves her unfinished paper on 'Date Rape' to go for a beer. Much more astute about sexual politics than Offred, she is an activist in the Gay Rights movement, working for a women's collective at the time of the Gilead coup. When she is brought into the Rachel and Leah Centre she is still wearing jeans and declares that the place is a 'loony bin' (Chapter 13). She cannot be terrorised into even outward conformity-, instead she tries to escape and succeeds on her second attempt. She manages to escape disguised as an Aunt. Always funny and ironic, to the other women at the Centre she represents all that they would like to do but would not dare: 'Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd' (Chapter 22).
Moira continues to surface in Offred's narrative, bobbing up in memory, until her devastatingly fimny final appearance at Jezebel's. Behind the comedy, however, is the fact that Moira has not managed to escape after all, and as an unregenerate has been consigned to the brothel, where she tells Offred that she has 'three or four good years' ahead of her, drinkingand smoking as a Jezebel hostess, before she is sent to the Colonies. Our last view of Moira is on that evening: 'I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen' (Chapter 38).
Moira is one of the spirited feminist heroines, like Offred's mother and Offred's predecessor in the Commander's house who left the message scrawled in the closet. The sad fact is these women do get sent off to the Colonies or commit suicide, which Offred herself refuses to do. Offred and Moira are both feminist heroines, showing women's energetic resistance to the Gilead system, but there are no winners. Neither compromise nor rebellion wins freedom, though it is likely that Offred is rescued by Nick. However, their value lies in their speaking out against the imposition of silence, challenging tyranny and oppression. Their stories highlight the actions of two individual women whose very different private assertions become exemplary or symbolic. Their voices survive as images of hope and defiance to be vindicated by history.
SERENA JOY
Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, is the most powerful female presence in Offred's daily life in Gilead, and as Offred has plenty of opportunity to observe her at close quarters she appears in the narrative as more than just a member of a class in the hierarchy of Gileadean women. As an elderly childless woman she has to agree to the grotesque system of polygamy practised in Gilead and to shelter a Handmaid in her home, but it is plain that she resents this arrangement keenly as a violation of her marriage, and a continual reminder of her own crippled condition and fading feminine charms. The irony of the situation is made clear when Offred remembers Serena Joys past history, first as a child singing star on a gospel television show, and later as a media personality speaking up for ultra-conservative domestic policies and the sanctity of the home. Now, as Offred maliciously remarks, Serena is trapped in the very ideology on which she had based her popularity: 'She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her' (Chapter 8).
Serena's present life is a parody of the Virtuous Woman: her only place of power is her own living room, she is estranged from her husband, jealous of her Handmaid, and has nothing to do except knit scarves for soldiers and gossip with her cronies or listen to her young voice on the gramophone. The only space for Serena's self-expression is her garden, and even that she cannot tend without the help of her husband's chauffeur. If flowers are important to Offred, so are they too to Serena, and she often sits alone in her 'subversive garden', knitting or smoking.
To see the world from Serena's perspective is to shift the emphasis of Offred's narrative, for these two women might be seen not as opposites but as doubles. They both want a child, and the attention of them both focuses on the Commander of whom Serena is very possessive: 'As for my husband, she said, he's just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It's final' (Chapter 3).
Offred seldom knows what Serena is thinking, though there are indications of her attitudes and tastes in the jewels and the perfume she wears and in the furnishings of her house: 'hard lust for quality, soft sentimental cravings' as Offred uncharitably puts it (Chapter 14). There is also evidence of a certain toughness in Serena's cigarette-smoking and her use of slang, not to mention her suggestion that Offred, unknown to the Commander, should sleep with Nick in order to conceive the child she is supposed to produce: 'She's actually smiling, coquettishly even; there's a hint of her former small-screen mannequin's allure, flickering over her face like momentary static' (Chapter 31). But Serena has her revenges too: she has deliberately withheld from Offred the news of her lost daughter and her photograph which Offred has been longing for.
By a curious twist, Serena occupies the role of the wife in a very conventional plot about marital infidelity, as well as in the privileged Gileadean sense. She is one of the points in the triangular relationship which develops between Offred and the Commander: 'The fact is that I'm his mistress ... Sometimes I think she knows' (Chapter 26). Actually, she does not know until she finds the purple costume and the lipstick on her cloak. It is a clich6-like situation, but Serena's own pain of loss goes beyond this conventional pattern: ... Behind my back," she says. "You could have left me something."' Offred wonders, 'Does she love him, after all?' (Chapter 45).
Serena is still there in her house, standing anxiously beside the Commander at the end as Offred is led out through the door. Her farewell to Offred is wifely in an old-fashioned sense which has none of the pieties of Gilead: ... Bitch," she says. "After all he did for you (Chapter 46).
THE OTHER COMMANDERS' WIVES
These merely exist as a gaggle of gossips in blue, for Offred knows nothing of their lives apart from overhearing snatches of their conversation at Birth Days, Prayvaganzas or social visits, when they make scandalous comments about their Handmaids. Only the Wife of Warren achieves a moment of grotesque individuality when she is seen sitting on the Birth Stool behind Janine, 'wearing white cotton socks, and bedroom slippers, blue ones made of fuzzy material, like toilet-seat covers' (Chapter 21). There is also one other unfortunate Wife who is hanged at the Salvaging, but Offred does not know what her crime was. Was it murder? Was it adultery? 'It could always be that. Or attempted escape' (Chapter 42).
THE AUNTS
Like the Wives, the Marthas, the Econowives and most of the Handmaids, these are presented as members of a class or group, every group representing a different female role within Gilead. With their names derived from preGileadean women's products, the Aunts are the older women who act as female collaborators on the orders of the patriarchy to train and police Handmaids. They are a paramilitary organisation, as is signified by their khaki uniforms and their cattle prods, and, as propagandists of the regime, they tell distorted tales of women's lives in the pre-Gileadean past. The villainesses of the novel, they are responsible for the most gruesome cruelties, like the female Salvagings and the Particicutions, as well as for individual punishments at the Rachel and Leah Centre.
Only Aunt Lydia is individuated, and that is by her peculiar viciousness masquerading under a genteel feminine exterior: 'Aunt Lydia thought she was very good at feeling f6r other people' (Chapter 8). A particularly sadistic tormentor, Aunt Lydia is an awful warning that a women's culture is no guarantee of sisterhood as Offred's mother's generation of feminists had optimistically assumed, but that it is also necessary to take account of some women's pathological inclinations towards violence and vindictiveness.
OFGLEN AND OFWARREN
Only two of the Handmaids, Ofglen and Ofwarren Ganine), emerge as individuals, one because of her courage and rebelliousness and the other because she is the conventional female victim figure. Both are casualties of the Gileadean system.
Ofglen has no past life that Offred knows about, but she does have a secret life as a member of the Mayday resistance movement which she confides to Offred after weeks as her shopping partner. There is nothing exceptional about her appearance except her mechanical quality which Offred notices, 'as if she's voice- activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels' (Chapter 8). Offred is proved right in her suspicions, for under the disguise of Handmaid, Ofglen is a sturdy resistance fighter. She identifies the alleged rapist as 'one of ours' and knocks him out before the horrible Particicution begins. She also dies as a fighter, preferring to commit suicide when she sees the black truck coming rather than betray her friends under torture. Offred learns this from her replacement, the 'new, treacherous Ofglen', who whispers the news to her on their shopping expedition.
Janine is a female victim in both her lives: before Gilead when she worked as a waitress and was raped by a gang of thugs, then as a Handmaid. At the Rachel and Leah Centre she is a craven figure on the edge of nervous collapse, and consequently one of Aunt Lydia's pets. Though she has her moment of triumph as the 'vastly pregnant' Handmaid Ofwarren in Chapter 5, she is also a victim of the system with which she has tried so hard to curry favour. Even at the Birth Day she is neglected as soon as the baby is born and left 'crying helplessly, burnt-out miserable tears' when her baby is taken away and given to the Wife (Chapter 21). There is no reward for Janine. Her baby is declared an Unbaby and destroyed because it is deformed; Janine becomes a pale shadow overwhelmed with guilt; finally, after the Particicution, when Offred sees her again, she has slipped over into madness.
OFFRED'S MOTHER
Offred's mother and her life belong to the history of feminism which is being recorded in this novel, for she joined the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, campaigning for women's sexual and social freedom. As an older woman she continued to be a political activist, and at the time of the Gileadean take-over she disappeared. Only much later does Offred learn that she has been condemned as an Unwoman and sent to the Colonies.
Like Moira, and possessing the same kind of energy, Offred's mother resists classification. In an odd way she even resists being dead, for she makes two startling appearances in the present, both times on film at the Rachel and Leah Centre. On one occasion Offred is shocked to see her as a young woman marching toward her in a pro-abortion march, and later Moira reports seeing her as an old woman working as slave labour in the Colonies.
Offred's mother is, however, more than a feminist icon. She haunts her daughter's memory, and gradually Offred comes to understand her mother's independence of mind and to admire her courage. Her mother is evoked in a series of kaleidoscopic images: at a feminist pornographic book burning (Chapter 7), with a bruised face after an abortion riot (Chapter 28), and as an elderly woman proudly defending her position as a single parent to Offred's husband, while accusing her daughter of naivet6 and political irresponsibility. It is her jaunty language which Offred remembers as distinguishing her mother:
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but he wasn't up to fatherhood. Not that I expected it of him. Just do the job, then you can bugger off, 1 said, I make a decent salary, I can afford daycare. So he went to the coast and sent Christmas cards. He had beautiful blue eyes though. (Chapter 20)
An embarrassing but heroic figure, this is the woman whom her daughter misses when it is all too late, though Offred continues her dialogue with her mother in her own mind as a way of keeping her alive: 'Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies' (Chapter 21).
Finally Offred tries to lay her mother to rest, but without success: 'I've mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again' (Chapter 39).
Deprived of the freedoms which her mother fought for, Offred learns to admire her mother's courage and to value her memory as a vital link with her own lost identity. Her elegy to her mother underlines the thematic motif of Missing Persons, and particularly lost mothers and daughters, which runs through the novel.
MALE CHARACTERS
The few male characters in this novel seem little more than functionaries of the patriarchal state or functional to the workings of the plot. Most of them have no names but only group identities like 'Angels' or 'Eyes' or 'the doctor', while Professor Pieixoto is a satirical sketch of a male academic. Only three male characters are given any individuating characteristics. They are Offred's Commander, her lover Nick, and her absent, vanished husband Luke.
THE COMMANDER
The Commander is the most powerful authority figure in Offred's world. He is a high-ranking government official, and he is head of the household to which Offred is assigned. It is his first name which she takes, though whether as a slave or as a parody of the marriage service is never made clear. Yet he is an ambiguous figure, substantial but shadowy, whose motivations, like his career in Gilead, remain unclear to Offred; even in the 'Historical Notes' his identity remains uncertain. As a Commander he wears a black uniform and is driven in a prestige car, a Whirlwind. He is an elderly man with 'straight neatly brushed silver hair' and a moustache and blue eyes. He is slightly stooped and his manner is mild (Chapter 15). As Offred observes him with his gold-rimmed glasses on his nose reading from the Bible before the monthly Ceremony, she thinks he looks 'like a midwestern bank president', an astute judgement, as he tells her much later that before Gilead he was in market research (Chapter 29). The image he presents is that of male power, isolated and benignly indifferent to domestic matters, which include his Wife and his Handmaid. This is, however, not entirely true, for Offred has seen him earlier on the day of the Ceremony, a figure lurking in the shadows outside her room, who tried to peer at her as she passed: 'Something has been shown to me, but what is it?' (Chapter 8).
It is only after the official Ceremony, performed by the Commander in full dress uniform and with his eyes shut, that Offred has the chance to get to know him a little and his stereotypical male power image begins to break down. It is he who asks her to visit him 'after hours' in his study, for he is a lonely man who desires friendship and intimacy with his Handmaid and not the serviceable monthly sex for which she has been allocated to him. In his Bluebeard's chamber, what he has to offer is not 'kinky sex' but Scrabble games and an appearance of 'normal life', with conversation and books and magazines, all of which he knows are forbidden to Handmaids. On his own private territory the Commander is an old-fashioned gentleman with an attractive sheepish smile, who treats Offred in a genially patronising way and gradually becomes quite fond of her. 'In fact he is positively daddyish' (Chapter 29). He seems to have the ability to compartmentalise his life (in a way that Offred cannot manage) so that he can separate her official role as sexual slave from her unofficial role as his companion. In many ways the Commander's motives and needs remain obscure to Offred, though they do manage to develop an amiable relationship, which from one point of view is bizarre and from another is entirely banal: 'The fact is that I'm his mistress' (Chapter 26).
Yet their relationship is still a game of sexual power politics in which the Commander holds most of the cards, as Offred never allows herself to forget. For all his gallantry, he remains totally trapped in traditional patriarchal assumptions, believing that these are 'Nature's norm' (Chapter 34) and allow exploitation of women, as his comments and conduct at Jezebel's suggest. Their private sexual encounter there ends in 'futility and bathos' and is strongly contrasted with Offred's meeting with Nick later that same evening. As she leaves his house for the last time, Offred sees the Commander standing at the living-room door, looking old, worried and helpless. Possibly he is expecting his own downfall, for nobody is invulnerable in Gilead. Offred has her revenge, for the balance of power between them has shifted: 'Possibly he will be a security risk, now. I am above him, looking down; he is shrinking' (Chapter 46).
The academics go to some trouble later to establish the Commander's identity: he may have been 'Frederick R. Waterford' or 'B. Frederick Judd'. Waterford, it is revealed, had a background in market research (which seems most likely), while the more sinister Judd was a military strategist who worked for the CIA. Both of them 'met their ends, probably soon after the events our author describes'.
NICK
Nick is presented as the central figure of Offred's romantic fantasy, for he is the mysterious dark stranger who is her rescuer through love. He also hasa place in her real world, of course, as the Commander's chauffeur and the Commander's Wife's gardener. He 'has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles' (Chapter 4) and a general air of irreverence, wearing his cap at a jaunty angle, whistling while he polishes the car, and winking at Offred the first day he sees her. At the household prayers he presses his foot against hers, and she feels a surge of sensual warmth which she dare not acknowledge. In the daytime he is rather a comic figure but at night he is transformed into Offred's romantic lover, the embodiment of sexual desire. This transformation is made all the more piquant because he is always acting under orders, either as the Commander's messenger or as the lover chosen for Offred by the Commander's Wife.
From their first unexpected encounter in the dark living room (Chapter 17) theirs is a silent exchange which carries an unmistakable erotic charge. It is Nicles hands which make his declaration: 'His fingers move, feeling my arm under the night-gown sleeve, as if his hand won't listen to reason. It's so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy (Chapter 17).
As a subordinate, Nick, like Offred, has to remain passive until ordered by the Commander's Wife to go to bed with Offred. On that occasion his attitude is not directly described but veiled by Offred's three different versions of that meeting. Certainly she falls in love with him, and in defiance of danger she returns many times to his room across the dark lawn on her own. Towards the end, she tells him that she is pregnant. Nevertheless, her description of their love-making is suggestive rather than explicitly erotic, and Nick tends to remain a mysterious figure.
Even at the end when he appears with the Eyes to take her away, Offred really knows so little about him that she almost accuses him of having betrayed her, until he calls her by her real name and begs her to trust him. Ever elusive, he is the only member of the household not there to see her depart. We want to believe that Nick was in love with Offred, and we must assume from the 'Historical Notes' that he did rescue her and that he was a member of Mayday resistance. However, as a character he is very lightly sketched and it is his function as romantic lover which is most significant.
LUKE
Luke, Offred's husband, is one of the Missing Persons in this novel. Probably dead before the narrative begins, he haunts Offred's memory until he fades like a ghost as her love affair with Nick develops. He is the one person Offred leaves out when she tells the story of her past life to Nick (Chapter 41), though she is still worrying about him at the end (Chapter 44).
He is also the most fragmented character in the text, appearing briefly as a name in Chapter 2, and then gradually taking on an identity as Offred's lover, husband and the father of her child. He is a figure whose life story stopped for Offred at a traumatic point in the past: 'Stopped dead in time, in mid-air, among the trees back there, in the act of falling' (Chapter 35). Through her reconstruction Luke appears as a late twentieth-century 'liberated man', full of courage and humour and remembered by Offred entirely in his domestic relations with her. He is an older man who has been married before, so that there is an ironic parallel drawn between him and the Commander. Offred remembers their affair when she goes with the Commander to Jezebel's, for it is the hotel where she and Luke used to go (Chapter 37). She retains the memory of a strong loving partner, and her detailed recollections are of Luke cooking and joking with her mother, of lying in bed with her before their daughter was born, of collecting their daughter from school. We never know what Luke's job was, but Offred recalls his supportive behaviour when she lost her job at the time of the Gileadean take-over and her resentment against him for being a man (Chapter 28).
Luke figures insistently in Offred's recurring nightmare of their failed escape attempt, not only in that final image of him lying shot face down in the snow, but also in her recollections of his careful preparations and his coolly courageous attempt to take his family to freedom over the Canadian border. His afterlife in the novel is very much the result of Offred's anxieties about what might have happened to him. Is he dead, or in prison? Did he escape? Will he send her a message and help her to escape back into their old family life? 'It's this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message' (Chapter 18). It is also her hope of this message which keeps the image of Luke alive. The anxieties we may feel for his fate are projections of Offred's own.
