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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".