In The Handmaid’s Tale, people who should be allies tear each other apart.
OPINION
“By her hand,” intones former handmaid June. She is messing with the biblical language of the tyrannical patriarchal theocracy of the Republic of Gilead – “By His hand”, “Under His eye” – as she
is wont to do. “By her f***ing hand.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is back for season five. This time it’s confrontingly personal. June and a posse of fellow Gilead escapees have exacted revenge on Commander Fred Waterford, the man in whose household June, then named Offred, after her master, was enslaved, raped and forced to give up her baby. As Gilead is wont to do.
“Run,” advises June, before Fred is hunted down and torn apart. For a disturbing interval she wears his blood as a trophy of war. It gets on her baby Nicole’s face. When the euphoria of payback fades, she goes the full Lady Macbeth, scrubbing at herself in horror. Out, damned spot.
The episode poses a question that has arisen often during the new golden age of television: can I still go the distance with Tony Soprano, Walter White and … June Osborne? Fred had it coming, but still. It seems there is only one way now for this to end for June.
June: so many scenes of her staring into the camera, dead behind the eyes, a carnivorous set to her jaw. Twitter grappled with the breaking bad going on, from “Like, wash your hands!” to “June. Girl, do what must be done.” It seemed over the top.
Until you pick up a newspaper. The show now struggles to keep up with the perverse plot twists of real life. There are daily headlines – “US abortion rights: Arizona judge approves return to 19th-century near-total ban” – that June would wearily recognise. In Iran, courageous women are being beaten, arrested, killed for the crime of showing their hair. Some of the “morality police” are women. Fred’s wife, the ironically named Serena Joy, now enemy number one, once briefly became an ally to June. She was also an architect of Gilead, her book, snappily titled A Woman’s Place, one of its founding texts. The world she helped to create would later chop off her finger for the sin of thinking women should be allowed to read. In Gilead, and in our increasingly unrecognisable world, people who should be allies tear each other apart.
Gilead is a world of low fertility caused by pollution and unspecified nuclear disaster. Season five dropped to Vladimir Putin’s veiled nuclear threats. At time of writing there is a desperate exodus of military-age men trying to escape Russia to avoid call-up, amid fears of border closure. Authoritarian regimes have a way of holding the whole world hostage.
Setting aside handmaid wrangler Aunt Lydia and her cattle prod, most chilling sight: a scene set in the freedom of Canada. Fans of Serena greet her arrivals and departures with candlelight vigils of support. The useful idiots. Or, as someone put it on social media, “All those Serena Joy supporters can move their asses over to Gilead.” They never do.
The price of revenge. A tormented June turns herself in. But the killing took place in the no man’s land between the show’s almost risibly reasonable version of Canada and Gilead. She’s fined $88 for illegal use of the mail system – she posted Fred’s severed finger to Serena – and sent her on her way: “Have a nice day!”
Surely she’ll go home to her family now, return to normal. There is no normal. Her first child is still south of the border. You can check out of Gilead but you can never leave.
June has taken everything Gilead can throw at her and dished some back. As the resistance motto goes, Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
An even better maxim for the world of this season, and for ours, may be provided by the resistance group June finally makes contact with, secret cells set on bringing down Gilead from within. It’s named after the international distress signal because we’re in this together and even June can’t do it alone. Mayday, mayday.
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