6.

Visualizing Emotion

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Brown and Grey) 1969

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the protagonist frequently uses visual elements (i.e. pattern, color, and perspective) to define her experience as a women with an emotional state of mind. Atwood recognizes that, as seen particularly in most of modern art, what we see has an unbelievable impression on what we feel.  She uses this to her advantage by incorporating visual elements into Offred's narrative.


Pattern
While in procession, Offred reflects, "We must look good from a distance: picturesque, like Dutch milkmaids on a wallpaper frieze...anything that repeats itself with the least minimum grace and without variation "(224). This image, of repeating, identical figures crossing a frame, visually expresses physical and emotional monotony experienced by the handmaids. The pattern represents the ordered aesthetic valued by Gilead's society. One can imagine that the image is predictable and appealing, but also oppressive in its strictness, a mold Offred hopes to break.


Color
When Offred senses herself growing appreciative of her environment, as opposed to maintaining resistance, she reflects "I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor...The danger is greyout"(210). I think in this case bright colors may represent rebellion, emotion, or individuality. Gilead is turning Offred's conscience monochrome, numbing her emotional experience. I feel like Mark Rothko's brown and grey composition above similarly embodies this emotional state.


Perspective
While alone in her room, Offred reflects,"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face...Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be" (153). In art, the mastery of perspective is about the accurate portrayal of relative space - the rational division of foreground, mid ground, and background. I think this sense of relativity in space is much like the sense of relativity in time. Offred wants to establish her past, present and future so that she can be an active observer with a memory of the past and with the ability to plan for the future. It is crucial that she evaluate her life, not as a collection of immediate details, but from a distance, with a comprehensive idea of the "big picture." I think a sense of perspective, or relative time, is empowering. It is crucial to  see beyond one's immediate existence. 


I believe Offred's visualizations are an extremely powerful literary tool. A reader, I can physically "see," and thus understand, the abstract emotions experienced by the protagonist.  I wonder if this characteristic, the targeting of senses (particularly sight), is a common occurrence in literature written by women...?


Also, this sort of manipulated "synesthesia" reminds me of the scenes in the Disney film Ratatouille, where animators  translate tastes described by the mouse with color and shape. The animations allow the audience (who are watching the film on television) to experience taste, something that would have otherwise been quite distant. (Link below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXoJjgxMj9M&feature=related

5.

Flowers

Red Canna, Georgia O’Keefe, 1923

http://www.humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/okeefe_and_warhol/

In The Handmaid's Tale, Mary Atwood is constantly integrating floral images into the narrative of her protagonist. Collectively, these references seem to link flowers with sexuality, freedom, superfluity, fertility. 

At the start of the novel, Offred describes the objects in her room and notes a floral picture, assuring readers that "flowers are still allowed" (17).  I wonder why Offred was sure to make this clear in her description -- what it is about flowers that could make them potentially criminal? 

While in procession amongst other handmaids, Offred yearns for something disorderly and irrational: a dandelion. She notices, "Not a dandelion in sight here, the lawns are picked clean. I long for one, just one, rubbishy and insolently random and hard to get rid of and perennially yellow as the sun. Cheerful and plebeian, shining for all alike" (224). Offred is desperate for any sign of rebellion against strict, sterile Gilsead society. A dandelion, a weed, would satisfy this urge. 

The floral iconography in the novel is often sexual. Offred is aware that flowers are "the genital organs of plants" (91). She, recalling some interpretations of Georgia O'Keefe's work, recognizes the flowers as utterly feminine in anatomy. Offred wonders as to why the irises have not been banned in her society, as they are "so female in shape"(153).

 Atwood later references flowers in images of feminine resiliency (91). She describes Serena Joy's gardening as “some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers…the fruiting body. To cut off the seed pods is supposed to make the bulb store energy" (153).  In the novel, flowers are sexual, described as "swelling" and "fruiting." While the narrator describes Serena's activity as "penance," the act seems subversive -- the damage actually makes the "bulb store more energy." Flowers (representative of female sexuality?), no matter the circumstance, will thrive come spring. They will "clamor to be heard, though silently" ( 153). 

When describing herself, Offred says, "I am like a room where things once happened and not nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor" (114). Here,  she employs botanical references to communicate her sexual activity as indirect, impersonal,  fertilization transmitted through a "window".

4.

Offred as a Nude in Literature


"The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude', on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed."

-- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

1.2.

3.4.

1.(Picasso)http://dbeveridge.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2001f/chem160/01/Photo_Gallery_Humanities/picasso/images/Les_Demoiselle

2.(Michelangelo)http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:David_von_Michelangelo.jpg

3.(Philip Wilson Steer)http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-naked-and-the-nude-middlesbrough

4.(Jan van Eyck)http://www.wga.hu/tours/flemish/eyck/1open1/u7eve1.html

Art Historian Kenneth Clark suggests that when describing figures in art there is a difference between the nude and the naked. Naked figures possess a certain awareness of their indecency. They look shameful, sensual, individual and personal. In contrast, nude figures are idealized. They are depicted with intense calculation. Their perfected, confident proportions are crafted to create an impersonal, universal form. While nakedness suggests that something intimate resides within, nudity is purely corporal. I would argue that Picasso's and Michelangelo's figures are nude, while Steer's and Van Eyck's figures are nude (pictured above). 

If we think of literature as an art, I think this distinction can definitely be applied to descriptions and language concerning the body. In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale she describes a world where women are perpetually "nude," in that they are defined only by their corporal existence. Their sole purpose is to facilitate reproduction -- they  are a "national resource," merely "two-legged wombs" (146). In a period of reflection, Offred tries to remember herself, "Time to take stock./ I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes. I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable ovaries "(153). She is incapable of defining herself without  resorting to physical attributes (her hair, her height, her ovaries). The uniform robes worn by females in Gilead ironically contribute to "nudity" in the sense that they inhibit any sense of individuality, and by extension, intimacy.  

When found in deeply personal experiences, like a bath in which she confronts her bare body, Offred is unsettled.  She reflects, "My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated...I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely" (73). In this world, Offred's body is synonymous with her identity and her life purpose. When she sees herself exposed, she sees herself "determined completely."  She doesn't feel the shame that a true naked individual would. Instead, in an eerie way, she feels completely defined by her corporal existence. 

I think the state of nakedness depends on an internal conscience. In my opinion, nakedness is fully related to an individual's will, whether he or she is or isn't willing to be unclothed. The existence of a conscience -- a personality behind a form -- suddenly makes what was neutral flesh and bones exposed, inappropriate, courageous, violated, erotic or whatever. Something has to be given a personality, a protection, a restriction, a complication to become valuable in the sense of intimate possibility. When thinking of women in the past, women who I'd call "naked," Offred reflects, "They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not"(35). Buttons and the capacity they hold for concealing and revealing, restraint and exposure, contribute to a body's state of nakedness. I think a person's willingness or resistance to becoming naked is much like these buttons -- full of potential. 

Offred lacks the potential for intimacy that comes with a free will. Instead, she is dictated, driven by the capacities of her body. When describing the past, Offred says, "There were limits but my body was nevertheless lithe, single solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges 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"(83). Offred recognizes that her body is more real, more reliable and more definitive than she is. She used to use her body as an instrument to her own needs but now she is "...like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor"(114). This image insinuates that she is physically hollow, her body a container, dictated or  by a force ("weeds") that invade (perhaps "fertilize" ?) her indirectly -- through a window, notably not directly through the "front door". Her will is completely irrelevant in Gilead. 

I also feel like Offred is nude in that she is lost, or separate from her own body. A naked person is one with the shape or limits of the body, whereas Offred looks to it as an outside entity. She reflects, "I sink into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future"(83). In many "out-of-body" observations, she looks curiously, unknowingly towards her own body for direction, orientation. She imagines herself as how she would appear to an "electron", "A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass" (122). When she associates her physical existence with "hazards" she gives it a treacherous, frightening connotation. She observes another woman, Serena Joy, who is also a victim of her own body. With age, "her face is sinking in upon itself"(56). Maybe Atwood is suggesting a conflict between females and their bodies, entertaining the idea that one may control the other. Perhaps the nature of this dynamic relationship (between the corporal body and the internal self) is what separates "nakedness" from "nudity". 

3.

The Power of Language


Mary Atwood writes The Handmaid's Tale with an acute sensitivity towards language and its power to control human thought. One can guess that Atwood structures her novel and scripts the protagonist's  thoughts knowing that a bountiful vocabulary is synonymous with conceptual freedom. When words do not exist, one cannot name an idea and thus cannot fully comprehend meaning. For example, without the arrangement of letters that make up the word "freedom" the concept itself is less concrete. The idea of freedom becomes fragmented, a discordant synthesis of feelings and experiences. 


Preceding Atwood's novel, George Orwell's fictional world in 1984 implements Newspeak, a colorless language that lacks the vocabulary necessary to inspire Oceanians to rebel. According to the Appendix which describes the language at the end of the book, Newspeak is designed to be spoken "without involving the higher brain centres at all”  and it is used to "“make all other modes of thought impossible” (Orwell, 352 & 342).


Atwood explores this idea throughout The Handmaid's Tail. The names of the handmaids are composite, including the preposition "of" (insinuating possession) and their Commander's name. The names for these women are not unique -- they place emphasis on their status as objects, mere possessions of males. In addition, these names are not permanent, but subject to change as they move form household to household. The result is that no handmaid establishes a real sense of identity. Without a name to call one's self, it is impossible to achieve full self-awareness, to unify the elements that make someone an individual under one word. Offred, the protagonists reflects, "I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to other; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter"(94).

In the narrative, we see the damaging effects of her anonymity through her inability to put herself in a position of possession. When she sees the Commander coming out of what she describes as her own room, she is startled: "I called it mine"(59).

 She also considers the idea that names make people and things real while considering how to address her audience. She uses "you" because "attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous" (49).

Gilead has manipulated its population with language in a variety of other ways. They have officially outlawed the word "sterile," which creates culture where all blame is placed on women. The protagonist reflects, There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren..."(71).

The women themselves are not permitted to read and must constrain themselves to a prescribed dialogue,  filled with "praise be's"and other exclamations of Christian faith. The word "FAITH" itself is the only word Offred is given to read, embroidered on the pillow in her room. These practices drill into speech and, by extension, into the mind, automatic reverence towards the government religion. By contrast, positive musical lyrics have been banned. After reciting the lyrics to "Amazing Grace" in her head, Offred explains, "Such songs are not sung any more in public, especially the ones that use words like free. They are considered too dangerous"(64). Gilead authorities eliminate the possibility that songs like these will inspire rebellion against the government and its policies.

Atwood incoorporates in references to language used in the protagonist's past to contrast the regulated vocabulary of her current life in Gilead. She marvels at the vivid figures of speech from the past. She wishes she, Rita and Cora would talk and share, using "a quaint expression you sometimes hear, from older people: I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveller, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is" (21). She recognizes the vitality in this expression, the distinct emotion it conveys: empathy for someone who has experienced something you have as well. This saying contrasts with the emotionally stark language regularly exchanged in Gilead. 

In one instance, I think Atwood expresses what could be the core issue of this novel in the seemingly causal context of vocabulary.  Offred reflects, "Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was  no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said" (21). Perhaps Atwood is insinuating that, without the word to unify the idea of "behaving like a sister," love cannot exist between fellow females in the same way that it can exist between males. This is already evident in what we know of Gilead -- the Marthas, Wives, and handmaids are all at odds with each other.  I believe that the course of this book should reveal whether or not this tension can be dissolved, and if, even without the vocabulary, sisterly connection can unify these females.  

2.

Women + Snakes

1.

2.

1. (Hugo Van Der Goes)-http://mmanninoarthist.tumblr.com/search/snake

2. (Michelangelo)-http://jewishchristianlit.com/Topics/AdamNeve/michel06.html

I have always been completely terrified by snakes, so Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat" really put me on edge. After some thought, it seems as though I fit a certain stereotype -- one that consistently defines women as being afraid of snakes. I've been confronted with this theme in literature and in visual arts. The Bible set this precedent with the Creation story, where Eve is tempted by the snake and eats forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, an act that dooms all of mankind. After this major transgression, man and woman are expelled from paradise, punished with mortality. Suddenly, after losing their innocence, they feel naked for the first time.

The fact that the snake (probably a form of the Devil?) choose to tempt Eve over Adam reiterates age-old conventions about female "frailty" and "impressionability." After contemplating this image, I wonder : what is it about snakes that makes them so terrifying to women? (Of course not terrifying to all women, but definitely to me and to other women in literature like Eve and Delia)

In "Sweat" Delia is mortified by the snake that Sykes brings home. It is not fear in the conventional sense (not a fear of death, injury, or physical pain), but a fear that she says "Kilt all mah insides"(3). Hurston describes Delia as afraid in a way that makes her mad. She stands in "a red fury that grew bloodier for every second that she regarded the creature that was her torment"(4). I think the snake targets something internal, she is not afraid of its violent physicality, but more of its "awful beauty" and artful "sound illusion" (the way in which the snake manipulates its prey with noises that do not betray its location).

Given these descriptions, I think Delia is afraid of a snake that represents not a lethal beast, but her own feminine weaknesses. Delia's inability to leave her incompetent, adulterous husband is, in a sense, like the frailty of Eve targeted by the snake in the Biblical story. The snake in "Sweat" tests Delia, and it is the last straw in her relationship with Sykes.

When Delia escapes from the snake, into the tree, she faces "a period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both"(5). Only after this self-evaluation is she able to let her husband die.

 Michelangelo and Van Der Goes both interpret the Biblical scene with a snake bearing the face of a woman, visually reiterating that what Eve, Delia, and women are most afraid of is themselves. Perhaps this is also what Charlotte Perkins Gilman sought to express with "The Yellow Wallpaper"-- a story in which a woman is driven insane by her own mind.