So as I mentioned, I’m not enthralled with Atwood’s main character and my general feeling was one of her first being a wimp (even her best friend Moira felt this way) for going along with everything so placidly–even while Atwood hammers home the fact of her mother having been a social activist, a manipulator (her first (?) opportunity to infiltrate the system is via her relationship with the Commander, and she uses it), and her rather me-me-me self-victimizing attitude.
Obviously the reason for the arrangement is damaging chemicals that have rendered many of the women barren, or incapable of producing a baby without severe defects. It would seem to me that if the population is truly in trouble, keeping a young, healthy woman in the service of an albeit properly credentialed older household for two to three years in the hopes of a successfull pregnancy and birth is not the quickest way to solve the problem. Although I’m sure the government doesn’t want uncontrolled breeding resulting in thousands of defective children. The couple in each case, a Commander and his Wife, are usually unable to have children and of course, want one. The handmaid needs to produce or else she may be sent to a worse fate. Human nature being what it is, the workaround of having a young stud do the impregnating instead of the aging Commander is brought up by the doctors, the girls, and the Wives themselves. Here, Serena (the Wife) brings a photo of her daughter to Offred as payment for their agreement to allow the chaffeur, Nick, to give it a shot:
I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side-up. Is this her, is this what she’s like? My treasure.
So tall and changed, Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.
Time has not stood still. I has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.
But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing?
Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she’d brought me nothing. (p. 228)
Offred appears to be upset by the loss of herself in her daughter’s life; more so than with the loss of her daughter. She appears to resent her child’s life: Smiling a little now, so soon — evidently too soon for Offred’s likes. She uses the metaphor of "a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water." Laying blame on a child is another resentment of her daughter’s life without her. And the final lines: "Still, I can’t bear it,…" would seem a true motherly anguish, are spoiled by the self-centered "to have been erased like that."
While this won’t prevent me from rooting for Offred’s escape, I can’t help but find the Commander’s rather sad and more human needs and actions more worthy of my sympathy.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology