Broken Facades

"Without his uniform he looks smaller, older, like something dried. The trouble is that I can't be, with him, any different from the way I usually am with him. Usually I'm inert."

    In this moment, just before she has sex with the Commander, Offred sees the second facade deconstruction of her night at Jezebels. Moira's appearance at the club was the first, but both her and the Commander shed parts of themselves that Offred has counted on since she met them.

   Moira didn't panic when the past society shut down her financial account, she took charge when Janine's sanity started slipping, and she carefully tricked an Aunt (armed with a cattle prod) to escape. To Offred, Moira was "swashbuckling" and "daring". For years, Moira's braveness inspired Offred's ideas of a strong woman, so seeing this braveness squelched in a place like Jezebels shakes Offred's perceptive foundation, making her much less "inert".

   The Gilead society subdued Moira, and this doesn't help how she sees the Commander. Up until the above quote, Offred notes that the Commander has the power to get rid of her at a moment's notice if she doesn't comply in meeting him at night. This constant threat gives him an edge of power that emphasizes his position in his region of Gilead, but he does not order her into explicitly sexual favors; he asks her to play Scrabble, breaks game and Gileadean rules by providing lotions and magazines, treating her with an almost fatherly intrigue in her manners and shows of precocity in their games.

    In the hotel, however, he sheds all of his power. There is no Scrabble, no pen, and no uniform, just remnants of his position ("something dried"). His facade is long gone. This begins once Offred is in the hotel bathroom, reflecting over the night in front of the "ample mirror" (Chapter 39, page 253). She calls herself "a wreck", and despite seeing her old friend, she is as "disheveled" as her used outfit. The Commander is waiting for her, but she wants to ruminate on the disappointment she just experienced. She looks past the risk in angering, or even merely annoying, him, so she figuratively begins to strips him of his high rank before they sleep together.

      The fact that both Moira and the Commander lose their original faces doesn't just change their appearance, it emphasizes Offred's differences as our narrator. Offred expresses a lot of thought and ideas in how she could escape or how the Aunts, Marthas, Wives, Commanders, and other officials assert their power, but she never acts on her own, the way that Moira does throughout the book, or shows the same level of pride that the Commander manages to exhibit in book and social knowledge. In comparison to him and Moira, Offred is a passive character. However, Offred's lack of action doesn't jade her position as the narrator because it brings out the level of power that surrounds her in Gilead. Her thoughts are contained, and this theocratic government served to keep them that way, showing her observers the power of a whole society in comparison to one person.

Image of Offred and the Commander is courtesy of The SciFi Movie Page
Image of Offred and Moira is courtesy of the Elizabeth McGovern Webpage
Image of Woman in a Jar is courtesy of 123 Royalty Free Stock Photos