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".