"Her fault"

As the maids stand in a circle, they point and blame Janine for being what would be known as unwomen. This is after she openly talked about how she was raped at fourteen, giving her an unwanted pregnancy which led her to have an abortion, something that was her full right. In the society of Gilead, pregnancies are sacred, if either the mom (maid) wants it or not. This secret which was told by Janine herself, brought her a sort of consequence. As she kneeled down, with her hands behind her back Martha could see. Everyone surrounds her and starts to chant, “Her fault” as they all point at her. “Last week, Janine burst into tears. Aunt Helena made her kneel at the front of the classroom. Hands behind her back, where we could all see her, her red face and dripping nose. Her hair was dull blond, her eyelashes so light they seemed not there, the lost eyelashes of someone who’d been in a fire. Burned eyes. She looked disgusting: weak, squirmy, blotchy, pink, like a newborn mouse. None of us wanted to look like, ever. For a moment, even though we knew what was being done to her, we despised her” (Pg.72) This scene demonstrates and shows a lot about what the book is all about. Women mentally abusing women, women being controlled by a society that denies their right to their bodies, and shames them if they oppose this new society’s ideologies. But no one is to blame these maids who shame Janine because they have been shamed/scared in order to follow the established beliefs, of being objects to give birth to children. For my first Lit log, I demonstrated this scene, in order to show the visual representation of how Janine would have looked and felt. In my drawing, she kneels down in front of six maids all pointing at her with their red long dresses that cover every inch of their bodies. Whitecaps cover their heads and eyes. I shade the sides of the paper in dark and in a triangle shape leaving blank up into where Janine is kneeling. This is to demonstrate the attention that she is being given. But not the good type of attention, the one where she is being stared at and it makes her feel uncomfortable around all the maids, chanting at her about how she’s a crybaby. As well as the shading of the drawing, the maid’s dress color is more light red, meanwhile Jenina is bright red in order to show her apart from the others. To put her in the spotlight of the drawing, her hands can also be seen behind her, giving the viewer perspective of her hands, in a way we are the ones who see how she’s helpless. It’s a cycle of fear, Janine is humiliated, scared, meanwhile as Aunt Lydia states in the passage. “ You are an example”, an example to all the other women to not go against the beliefs. Especially when it comes to abortion, where the punishment is death, for both the maid and the doctor who decides to help. The maids will know not to commit the same “crime” or they will have to face a punishment.