Misadventures in Blissville

Say the word and you’ll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine
It’s the word, love

In the beginning I misunderstood
But now I’ve got it, the word is good

Martha Rita didn’t have a kind word for Eden. She treated her like shit. June slept with Eden’s husband. Eden won’t be remembered. Her remains will be fed to animals. Her clothes will be burned. She’ll only be permitted to vanish. In June’s Gilead, women are classified only by their respective functions (wife, Martha, handmaid, slave, prisoner). June brings Serena Eden’s Bible, shows her that Eden had been reading, studying, and annotating her Bible. Serena tells June that Eden was wrong and sinned. June shouts at Serena that Nichole will grow up in a world where she will be forbidden from reading the Word of God. In another part of the house, Eden’s father apologizes to Nick for her behavior. “We tried to put her on the path to God,” he says. As it happened, her own parents dropped the dime on her, so to speak. Fred seems pleased with this development. June has already sewn some seeds of doubt with Serena, but she presses her luck with Fred, asking him what he will do when they come for his daughter. He smacks her hard across her face. This fills her with righteous rage. She turns around and smacks him hard in the face. He grabs her and tells her, “The mouth of a woman is a deep pit.” You know, Fred might actually be evil. Fred might be yet another cog of evil in the machinery of Gilead. It occurs to me that the hostility toward women isn’t based in any religion, but a deep-seated psychological hatred, and I will point out that a hatred of women is not necessarily a form of sexism or even dogma. There may be some deeper psychological issues at play here. When Rita sees Nick and June holding their baby, she puts two and two together. How long did it take for her to process this information? I think Rita has finally decided to become a hero.

Spread the word and you’ll be free
Spread the word and be like me
Spread the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine
It’s the word, love

Every where I go I hear it said
In the good and bad books that I have read

Next, we have handmaids talking without any Guardian supervision. This is new. Janine has been officially broken. I guess it was that last hit from Isaac. She doesn’t seem to understand that two young people were killed for no reason, that they were drowned for trying to run away together. Emily tells June her first Ceremony is scheduled for this night with Commander Lawrence and his wife. Emily is thinking about her son, who would be seven years old right now in Canada. At Commander Putnam’s house, Serena and Naomi gossip, but the gossip leads to a discussion. Serena advances the idea of worrying for their children’s future. “We want to give our children the best life they can have.” You know, before they are beaten, raped, mutilated, drowned, shot, or put on the wall. I mean, hey, you can’t have it all! Emily prepares for her Ceremony. Lawrence is blaring rock music all throughout the house. I don’t know if I’ve made mention of this before, but I believe the Commanders who are held in the highest esteem are given the nicest houses. Isn’t that interesting? Putnam’s house is big, gorgeous, and sunny. Waterford’s house is smaller (still big), but darker. Lawrence’s house is a disheveled mess, dark and confined. Lawrence lives like a master of war. This is a character I don’t understand. He’s pissy and he doesn’t care who knows it. He has a sense of humor. It’s unsettling. The Ceremony comes and goes, and nothing happens. The next day, Serena speaks at an open council meeting. She tries logic on the group of snickering men. She brings in the Commander’s wives. They stand behind her. Serena wants the children to learn to read. New law I just made up! Wives are to be kicked in the stomach twice a week from now on! Uh-oh. Serena is reading! Heresy! Off with her head! Some of the wives start leaving as she reads.* Fucking cowards. “You’ve given us a lot to consider,” Fred tells the assembled wives.

Say the word and you’ll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine
It’s the word, love

Now that I know what I feel must be right
I’m here to show everybody the light

Serena tells Fred she did it for Nichole. A couple of Guardians take her away. Nice place, huh? At the Lawrence household, Aunt Lydia visits Emily. Lawrence lied to Lydia, telling her the Ceremony went swimmingly. When she sees that Emily is uncommunicative, she turns her back on her and leaves. Emily grabs a steak knife she has stolen from the kitchen and stabs Lydia in the back, sending her tumbling down the stairs. Emily calmly follows her down the stairs and kicks her repeatedly, sending her down the rest of the way. Lawrence’s one-eyed Martha sees this, and puts Emily in a room, and tells Lawrence to call for an ambulance. Emily laughs with glee, and then she becomes afraid. When Serena returns later that night, June sees that her little finger is gone; chopped off. “We had a difficult day,” Fred tells her, “but all will be well.” Well now! If I remember my Gilead history correctly, Serena wrote a book, and that book became popular with a certain sub-section of the population, and here she is minus a little finger. It’s okay. She can still knit! Just sayin’. This is June’s fault. This is what June does. June is explicitly not a hero. Everything she has done has been in service to her survival. She does not sacrifice. She is the vessel for everyone else. Emily, Rita, Nick, even Janine early on were the conveyors of resistance. June is the Charlie Brown or the Pooh, witness and observer of the world around her; the non-reactive substance. The canvas, upon which the true heroes and villains paint their landscapes. Fred tells June that Serena needed to be reminded of her station. “God, send me an obedient woman,” Fred prays. I feel a righteous anger rising up in these women. Fred starts bargaining with June. He tells her she could stay with them. June tells Fred to go fuck himself.

Give the word a chance to say
That the word is just the way
It’s the word I’m thinking of
And the only word is love

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine
It’s the word, love

Say the word love
Say the word love
Say the word love
Say the word love**

Imagine being Emily for a minute. Alone in a dark room, not knowing what future has been written for her. Lawrence enters the room and says, “What are we gonna do with you?” He puts Emily in his car and they drive off. He turns on some Annie Lennox. Walking on, walking on broken glass… Emily cries in the backseat. Lawrence is really digging the song. She asks him to turn off the music. Emily doesn’t like Annie Lennox, so this is like torture for her. So, this week the show hates women! Over at the Waterford house, a bunch of fires are being set to distract from Rita’s plan to get June and the baby out of the house. Good for you, Rita! Suddenly we have developments. Apparently this was a coordinated effort by the Marthas. June is flying out the door when she runs into Serena and permits a tearful goodbye between her and her non-daughter. We’re spoon-fed the drama in small doses for the remaining twenty minutes of the season. Fred is oblivious to what’s going on. He rushes to Offred’s room and finds nothing but a handwritten message on the wall: “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum” loosely translated as, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” or even more loosely, “Go fuck your mother, Fred!” Unfortunately, everyone anticipating June’s escape should know this is a television show, and we can’t have our lead character ride off into the wild blue yonder. Meanwhile, Lawrence has arranged for Emily to escape Gilead. To fill out the running time, beautiful flashback shots of June and Hannah are wedged into shots of June hooking up with Emily, giving Emily the baby, telling Emily to call the baby Nichole, and then finally turning around and re-entering her handmaid life (set to the strains of “Burning Down the House”) as Emily and the baby escape in a truck. What?! Because it’s not a solid win if she can’t get Hannah out of Gilead? I’ve said it before. So much more could be accomplished in Canada if June was not encumbered by the restrictions placed on her life. She could plan surgical strikes and rescue operations, but no … June is not a hero. I don’t even think she’s expected to be a hero. She might be a well-rounded female character brought to life by a decent performance, but I wouldn’t call her a strong female character. Oddly, on this show, she’s defined only by her motherhood.

*I don’t know if anybody caught on to the fact that Serena was not actually reading from the Bible. She held the open book in her hands, but her eyes never met the pages. She was reciting verses from the book, not reading them. Hence, no law was broken. The idea was the crime.

**John Lennon/Paul McCartney. “The Word.” 1965. Rubber Soul. Parlophone Records Limited, 1965. Capitol Records Inc., 1965

That about does it for season two.  I’ll be back in a few weeks to cover the original movie, The Handmaid’s Tale from 1990 starring the late Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and Aidan Quinn.  Thanks for reading!