In the first couple episodes of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there are two aerial shots depicting the handmaids, dressed in vibrant scarlet, flocking together in an animalistic swarm. The first is when they murder an accused rapist at the behest of their totalitarian government. The second is when one of their own has her baby pulled from her arms immediately after giving birth, only this time, the handmaids move in to comfort her. Though depicting opposite ends of the spectrum of human behavior (on one side brutality and on the other compassion), the scenes are bonded by violence because that’s what drives a handmaid’s life in this brutal 10-episode adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel.
In the series’ opening scenes, we are introduced to Offred (Elisabeth Moss), our narrator and a handmaid in the house of the wealthy and powerful Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski). But, as we quickly see, her life wasn’t always that way. Before the United States crumbled into the theocratic society of the Republic of Gilead, she was your average college-educated woman, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband (O. T. Fagbenle) and daughter. When the U.S. government fell to right-wing religious extremists, that identity was taken from her and she became, to borrow her own words, “a womb with two legs” with not even a name to call her own. (In Gilead, handmaids take on the name of their head of household. “Offred” is derived from “Of Fred.”) In a time of decreased fertility, she and the other handmaids are the only ones left with viable ovaries and so they’re assigned to wealthy families for the singular purpose of breeding. Once a month, they must lay between their assigned wives’ legs and get fucked by their husbands, all in the hopes of getting pregnant with a baby that they must then give up to the wives immediately.
