Reproduction

In The Handmaid’s Tale, female anxieties associated with fertility, procreation, and maternity
are projected as feminist nightmare and cultural catastrophe. Atwood demonstrates the way in
which the profound and irreconcilable split between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” ideologies of
reproduction in contemporary social experience corroborate female ambivalence about
childbearing in patriarchy. She imagines a world in which women are explicitly defined by their
potential fertility (or its absence); procreation and maternity are simultaneously idealized and
dehumanized.

In the Republic of Gilead the “natural” world is utterly denatured. Pollution of the environment
has resulted in adult sterility and genetic mutation and deformity of offspring; generativity itself
is at risk. Hence, fertile females are made vessels for procreation; anatomy is indeed destiny. The
physically confining rooms, walls, and other actual boundaries of the Republic of Gilead
corroborate the condition of reproductive “confinement” to which the handmaids are subject.
Maternity is both wish (handmaids are discarded after three unsuccessful attempts at pregnancy)
and fear (the baby, unless deformed and declared an “Unbaby,” becomes the property of the
handmaid’s Commander and his wife). The surrogate mother’s function ceases after a brief
lactation period following delivery of a healthy child.
The handmaid Offred (the narrator), subjected to sexual exploitation masquerading as religious
fervor and worship of procreation, experiences herself as utterly subordinated to the procreative
function. In her former life she had regarded her body as an “instrument” under her own
control—with “limits . . . but nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.” In Gilead, her body,
like that of her coequal “handmaids,” exists literally to be used against her: “Now the flesh
rearranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear,
which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is
a space, huge as the sky at night. . . .” Under the pressure of terrifying alternatives, Offred
(whose name encodes her indentured sexuality: both “offered” and the property “Of-Fred”)
“resign[s her] body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am
abject”—and object.
In The Handmaid’s Tale the motifs of vision are an important part of the presentation of the
politics of sexual control: these motifs connect masters to slaves, Commanders to Handmaids.
The desires of both are controlled by state regulations: sex has been reduced to reproductive duty
without contact and love; Commanders are forbidden to have contact with Handmaids in private.
The sexual politics of Gilead foregrounds sexuality as reproduction, and leads the narrator to
view the world in terms of reproductive functions. Offred perceives flowers as “the genital
organs of plants.” As a result of this distorted vision, as Roberta Rubenstein notes, “distinctions
between human and non-human are grotesquely inverted or reduced.”