Margaret Atwood is often asked where she got the inspiration for her magnum opus, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” In interviews, she tends to answer the same way: “The Handmaid’s Tale” comes from real events. Everything in the novel, she’ll say, looking straight into the camera or squarely into the face of a fan, has already occurred.
History repeats itself; that much we know. Everything in the novel is still occurring. It happened on the MSNBC franchise I write and produce: the Velshi Banned Book Club. Atwood sat down for an interview with host Ali Velshi and clearly elucidated that she was far more worried today than when she wrote the novel in 1985. Just one day later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Her worry, it seemed, was correctly placed.
While it’s hard to say enough about Elizabeth Moss’ stunning portrayal of June in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in this final season, which concluded Monday, what — or who — rings the truest to me in our present political moment is the character of Serena Joy, played by Yvonne Strahovski.
When the series debuted in 2017, there was no meaningful Trad Wife movement or any other so publicized return to traditionalism. We saw glimmers of an uptick in women-led conservatism, in the 52% of white women who voted for Donald Trump the first time he ran for office, for example. But Serena still felt paradoxical to me.
If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the book, television, stage or film adaptation, “The Handmaid’s Tale” takes place in a near-future America called the Republic of Gilead, now governed by a theocratic dictatorship. With much of the population left infertile from environmental disasters, Gilead has implemented forced surrogacy and sexual slavery. (Indeed, the environmental component of the book has become alarmingly more relevant, but that is best left explored for another column.) Fertile “handmaids,” a term and concept taken directly from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, are enslaved, raped by high-ranking officials, impregnated and then forced to surrender their children to their rapists and their complicit wives. Our hero, June, is one such handmaid. Strahovski’s Serena, one of the show’s most callous and complex antagonists, is the wife of Commander Waterford, to whom June is enslaved. The first season of the show follows the novel very closely, but the subsequent seasons are the creation of Bruce Miller with input from Atwood.
A true believer in Gilead, Serena is not a woman carried by the tide of a regressive Puritanical movement out of her control. Serena herself helped make the waves. It was her Cult of Domesticity-type polemic, her written work and public-facing persona, that helped create Gilead.
Season six opens with June and Serena, joined once again by fate, on a train with other women seeking refuge from Gilead. As the two women speak about the horrors they have experienced in Gilead with other refugees, someone exposes Serena by calling her by her notorious married name: Mrs. Waterford. The refugees want revenge, and Serena, now a war criminal for the role she played in Gilead, doesn’t back down. “Before Gilead, America was full of whores,” she tells them, with indignant eyes and gritted teeth. “Women were getting raped and killed every day, and nobody cared, and that was your country. You were unfit. I am not responsible for your tragedies; your children were not taken from you, they weren’t stolen, they were saved. God hated America because America turned their back on God, and God took your country away. God bless, America.”
Serena is always both an oppressor and a victim.
Serena is always both an oppressor and a victim. This consistent duality, up until the very end when Serena marries another Gilead Commander under the false pretense that he is one of the good and progressive ones, is one of the most compelling aspects of the show. Why? Because Serena, as a phenomenon and as a woman, is real. Many American women perpetuate and then ultimately suffer under patriarchal structures. Their reasons for aligning themselves with an oppressor may be varied, but the outcome will always be the same. There is no room for women in a world like that. Serena proves that to us.
Like the increasingly popular conservative influencers who substantially profit from advocating a return to biblical subservience, Serena is incongruous. Crucially, “The Handmaid’s Tale” doesn’t demand we view her in any one way. Serena is nuanced, willing to bend the rules of the society she created to meet her own needs and sometimes sympathetic. She, too, has suffered physical and emotional abuse.
In the final episode, Serena apologizes to June while boarding a bus bound for a U.N. refugee camp. Tearfully, holding her son, Noah, wrapped in blankets, she says, “When I recall some of the things that were done to you and the things that I did and that I forced you to do, I’m ashamed.”
June forgives her, the two women embrace, and Serena gets on the bus. After, a U.S. Commander commends June’s “generous” forgiveness. June demurs and says, “You have to start somewhere.” Like so much of this show and the source material, that small moment is thought-provoking. Is forgiveness the place to start?
Serena no longer feels improbable to me. Atwood warned us, in the pages and in the scenes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that women like Serena have existed and will continue to exist. I don’t know why I didn’t believe her.
