The Handmaid's Tale Women and Femininity Quotes Page 2
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
| Quote #4 I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. (17.11) |
The narrator misses other elements of being a woman and a person. For her, being held, named, and valued in the ways she used to be – as a person, not a uterus – are a part of being a woman.
| Quote #5 Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. [...] I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. [...] I am 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. (18.6) |
Here the narrator feels dispassionate and alienated from her body. Even when she tries to touch herself, she doesn't feel anything; she just thinks of herself as an empty room.
| Quote #6 Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies. (21.34) |
In an ironic moment of anti-feminism, a "women's culture" does exist, but it isn't one any reasonable feminist (male or female) would have wanted. It's a terrible realization of a different kind of imagined equality.
