Handmaid's Tale Blog #1

The Handmaid's Tale was a bit confusing to me at first because I didn't understand what was happening in the first few chapters, but now I understand that there are Commander's Wives, Handmaids and Marthas. The Commannder's wives are the highest of the rank and are supposidly the eldest. They, I suppose can not have children and are very aged. The woman that Offred is a handmaid for is an example because Offred tells us that she once saw her new mistress on a television show when she was a young girl. Handmaids are women that bare children for the commander's wives, they have the option to continue to make babies or to become a martha, which is a woman that does the cooking, cleaning and dirty work of the house. When Offred was talking about what it was like before she was a handmaid and how she went to college, had kids and how she used to live a life more different than how she lives now-it shocked me! I wondered how a society was created like this one, where guardians that were called angels were the protectors and almost as if they were to be respected and regarded as the higher, greater sex.
The sex ritual that they have seems really religious, before Offred was to have sex with the commander to create babies, there was a special ritual that had to happen before any sex took place. I think that the commander's wife is jealous of the handmaids because they can no longer have babies, and thats why when Offred first stepped into the commander's wife's house, she warned her right off the bat that her husband was only hers and no one elses and it shall remain that way. That shows that the commander's wife wats to have children, but the fear of losing her husband to another woman is most definitely frightening so the commander's wife is mean and strict. The marthas are people that do the housework around the house and do as they are told. They wear green, I think, I'm not sure. Handmaids wear red, and as Holleigh was talking about today, red symbolizes fertility and sin. So handmaids having sex is a sin for having it with a man not their counterpart, and they need fertility to conceive babies. The wives all wear blue.
The handmaid's tale is quite interesting, because I would not have thought that there could be a society such as this where women are set into different standards and once again, men are given more freedom. The women are more restricted to what they can and can not do. Women can not talk or make eye contact with men, they can not be lustful. The men, like the limo driver, Sam, can hit on a woman, but a woman like Offred is not allowed to respond in any way. The women have to talk a certain way, and are not allowed to communicate or gossip with other women.