In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margret Atwood explores the limited freedoms available to women in the newly formed dystopian society of Gilead. The Handmaid’s Tale follows Offred, the protagonist and a Handmaid in Gilead, a society that assigns roles and divides women from one another. Gilead values women solely for their ability to fulfill certain roles assigned to them by the men. These include the ability to reproduce, and fulfill stereotypically feminine roles, such as doing housework or being a wife. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood presents the bathroom as a place of freedom within the dystopian Gilead, while simultaneously expressing these freedoms through the narrative itself. In Gilead, women do not have many basic freedoms: the freedom of
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Jezebel’s is the club that the Commanders go to for access to sex outside of their duties with the Handmaids. Offred’s Commander takes her with him to Jezebel’s, where she sees women who have access to many of the freedoms that she lives without. The women at Jezebel’s are a tight knit group; when Offred enters the women’s bathroom the other women stare at her warily until her friend Moira vouches for Offred. Immediately, the other women relax and become more welcoming to Offred. The women in the bathroom are able to create a sense of community and friendship that does not exist among other women. Within the bathroom, the women speak freely. While Moira states that they are most likely being recorded, the women have little to fear from the government because they have already been removed from Gilead’s society and have the freedom of speech that Offred and other women lack in the outside world. Similarly, the bathroom is simultaneously the one place where the focus on the body is expected yet at the same time it is the only place the women in Gilead can escape the objectification and of their bodies by men. Here bodily focus is not synonymous with objectification. The women are separate from the men who normally objectify them, and are in that sense free from objectification. In this way, the bathroom at Jezebel’s provides the women with a safe space where they are able to reclaim personal freedom denied to the rest of the female population of Gilead. Of course, Jezebel’s bathroom is not a perfect
Jezebel’s is the club that the Commanders go to for access to sex outside of their duties with the Handmaids. Offred’s Commander takes her with him to Jezebel’s, where she sees women who have access to many of the freedoms that she lives without. The women at Jezebel’s are a tight knit group; when Offred enters the women’s bathroom the other women stare at her warily until her friend Moira vouches for Offred. Immediately, the other women relax and become more welcoming to Offred. The women in the bathroom are able to create a sense of community and friendship that does not exist among other women. Within the bathroom, the women speak freely. While Moira states that they are most likely being recorded, the women have little to fear from the government because they have already been removed from Gilead’s society and have the freedom of speech that Offred and other women lack in the outside world. Similarly, the bathroom is simultaneously the one place where the focus on the body is expected yet at the same time it is the only place the women in Gilead can escape the objectification and of their bodies by men. Here bodily focus is not synonymous with objectification. The women are separate from the men who normally objectify them, and are in that sense free from objectification. In this way, the bathroom at Jezebel’s provides the women with a safe space where they are able to reclaim personal freedom denied to the rest of the female population of Gilead. Of course, Jezebel’s bathroom is not a perfect