How Is Serena Joy Represented In The Novel example essay topic

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 clich 6-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 pities of Gilead: ...

Bitch", she says. "After all he did for you (Chapter 46)..