I’ve found myself often mulling my least favorite character in this novel: Janine. She’s the only character in the book for whom the narrator expresses clear contempt. While she may quietly deride or ignore other figures in her life, Janine is the only person clearly within limits. Clearly, Offred is not alone in this. The prevailing sentiment at the Red Center is to “[treat] her the way people used t treat those with no legs who sold pencils on street corners (133).” Clearly, Janine is damaged. The young victim of a gang rape, she’s easily re-traumatized by the blame ritual at the Red Center. Yet in this new world, where women are theoretically safer from attack, Janine is no longer treated with the care or concern that are currently afforded to trauma victims in society. Her instability constitutes a danger to those around her, and thus, she is shunned and further harmed.

The manner in which the cast relates to Janine brings up a point that’s been made in other entries: empathy is gone from this novel. Where Janine would be an object of sympathy in another novel, here she’s “a dog that’s been kicked too many times,” and rather than creating a bond with anyone out of shared suffering, she must turn to the Aunts, or other authorities, for occasional validation. Yet even her quiet, safe submission is reviled. To the narrator, she’s “sucky Janine” the one probably crying in the back of the Prayvaganza . Even though our narrator is highly complicit with the Gileadan regime, behaving so well as to convince Ofglen that she’s pious for months, Janine’s submission is always more vile. Perhaps it’s her relative comfort in her new world that makes her an object of disgust. While other handmaids have the grace to at least be unhappy, Janine seems to truly take pleasure in the minor privileges she’s granted, like a pigeon conditioned to peck at a stimulus that only results in their receiving a shock.

Janine is interesting, inasmuch as she’s a character who really can’t exist within a truly utopian vision. She’s so susceptible to any form of manipulation that she would unintentionally create, at least locally, a crack in any system she belonged to, unless it was so completely totalitarian that she couldn’t receive any contradictory messages. She’s so terribly well-behaved within the Republic of Gilead only because the messages she receives are so completely standardized that she can follow every directive she’s given. Perhaps what’s so disturbing about Janine is that she’s so very well suited to the social system of Gilead.