This Can't Be Right

“I know this can’t be right, but I think it anyway. Everything they taught us at the Red Center, everything I’ve resisted, comes flooding in. I don’t want pain.”

In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, protagonist Offred releases this sentiment after learning that her partner, and to her knowledge her only affiliation with the underground Mayday Rebels, Ofglen has hanged herself in the preservation of secrecy regarding her organization. While Offred’s relief and gratitude are remotely understandable, recognizing her fear that Ofglen may have revealed what little part she has had in the rebellion, if really any part at all, they are also seemingly selfish. This again provides a circumstance in the novel in which passive Offred is dictated by her inability to be anything but a pawn dictated by the actions of others, as well as shows her readiness to worship the false idols of Moira and her Mother crafted by her memory rather than those that have expressed an actual activeness within the story. Offred remarks that “everything [she has] resisted comes flooding in.” providing an immediate shift in attitude promoted by the wake of a fear far greater than the society itself could ever orchestrate, the fear of her own capability. It is telling of the ways in which dystopian society is formulated, with fear as the real primary control. Offred resisted the teachings of the Red Center, if only mentally, she was trained there, locked up there, persecuted there; yet the systematic routine of formality and restrained even is no match for inherent and self-propagated fear, not even necessarily as punishment but rather as a consequence of interpersonal conflict. This is evident because of the events that compose the retelling of Offred’s morning prior to Ofglen’s suicide. Offred witnesses the hanging of three women and the slaughter of a man wrongfully accused of rape, convicted and killed. Offred is first under the impression that the man has committed a crime, she has a false understanding of it, and thus she is greater in her rage; but once she knows he is a rebel, her rage evolves to fear because such a fear is much closer to her own activities and relationships and is therefore more personal. The underground has been defeated, unseen heroes are exposed. And the will of Ofglen to kill herself on her own conviction is a greater stabilizer, or a better mechanism that controls Offred’s will to repent and to comply. It seems as though the controlling factors must be so much more personal, even self-invented and it becomes Offred’s own paranoia that cripples her. She relinquishes herself to others, keeping with her duties and with the consistent passiveness that is witness in her character throughout the novel. At times like these, she becomes her own enemy when she cannot afford to have one. Her wavering instability and her lack of foresight lead her to create an environment of fear and of secrecy that consumes her better than the confines of society’s oppressive regime.