We’ve said a lot already about some pretty powerful issues that can’t be ignored in this book. Here, I think I’d like to talk about something that isn’t perhaps as critical to understanding the novel’s implications for our own real, modern world, at first glance or otherwise. I’m interested in how the novel deal with empathy; as a human characteristic, as a potentially gendered characteristic, its sentimentalization (or lack thereof), and the ways that these understandings of empathy might inform society, dystopic or otherwise. To be clear, I really think this novel makes a point of *not* sentimentalizing empathy (or sympathy), and by doing so seems to imply that it may not be a natural (real? easy?) human instinct. This is quite different form the way that so many narratives, Hollywood or otherwise, are formed, in which it is empathy that finally breaks through a villain’s shell or that sets the hero apart from the rest and make him/her attractive to others. The Handmaid’s Tale the film is hugely different from the book in this respect I think, and therefore I’m going to ignore it for now.
One of the things we talked about in the last class on Monday (and is discussed extensive on this blog) was a particular scene at the end of chapter 28 (my page 236, probably not yours), one of many flashbacks, in which Offred is remembering Luke’s reaction and attempt at comforting her when she ends the day without a job and with no property whatsoever to her name. Some people are troubled by the depiction of Luke here, either as unfeeling and chauvinistic (he doesn’t care enough about her problems to think twice about asking for sex), or as an unfair and emotionally warped depiction of him by an upset Offred. Either of these interpretations seems to me potentially to make a comment on the gendered nature of empathy, depending on whether it is Luke or Offred who is incapable of understanding the feelings and motivations of the other. I’m more inclined to understand Luke in this scene as unable to understand, despite his intentions. His actions read more to me like someone who wants to offer comfort, but is unsure how in the face of feeling he cannot comprehend. Offred herself was just as complacent before that day when confronted with signs of the coming horrors, feeling that she was watching stories “About other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others” (74). In fact, later in the novel Offred almost seems to be troubled by the universal ability to ignore and distance: in Gilead marketplace with Ofglen, Offred witnesses one of the few public disturbances in the novel, a scene in which a seeming innocent bystander is whisked away by the Eyes in a brutal maneuver. Shortly thereafter the traffic resumes as though nothing had happened, and Offred notes that all she feels is relief that it wasn’t her (220).
I find that the most frightening characteristic of this novel is the isolation that every citizen of Gilead, and the isolation that we experience through Offred’s eyes. She constantly dwells on how she does not (and can not) know what her companion, be Ofglen, Serena Joy, The Commander, or Nick, is feeling. One almost expects some relief of this emotional isolation to come of Offred’s interactions with the Commander, since he seems to imply that understanding and complicity is what he seeks, and Offred is there because his wife and he “Don’t seem to have much in common, these days” (203). However, though Offred and the commander become more human to one-another, there is no genuine understanding of the mentality of the other. “For him, I must remember, I am a whim.” (205). The most Offred can seem to say of any newfound understanding of or connection with the commander is that “He is of interest to me, he occupies space, he is more than a shadow” (210).