The Colors of Gilead

The colors the women and men wear in The Handmaid’s Tale deliberately reveal their role in Gilead through a biblical lens. The typical battle between Red vs. Blue or Hot vs. Cold is portrayed through the Handmaids and the Wives. Red in the Bible is typically talked about in terms of blood. Or in this case, a woman’s menstrual cycle. This reveals to the Gilead society that the handmaid is a fertile woman who has been assigned the role of giving birth. Accompanied by the color white, the Handmaids wore a white-winged hat, representing Jesus Christ, innocence, and sacrifice. The Handmaids are forced into sacrificing their minds, knowledge, and identities to an abusive society.

In the Bible, the color blue is often referred to as pure blue, or the Virgin Mary, which can describe the irony of the Wive’s inability to get pregnant. Also, the book has never described the wives as being penetrated reinforcing their role as what is considered pure. In the first mention of the two colors (pg.9) Offred is describing the color umbrellas assigned to her, red, the commander, black, and the Commander’s wife, blue. It is later mentioned (pg.12) where Offred discusses the garden and the Wive’s relationship with caring for and maintaining it. In this quote, Margaret Atwood uses color to create an innuendo where Offred describes herself and her circumstances and other handmaids and the power the Wives hold over them. Their mental and physical freedom has been taken from them and they now have to adjust themselves to a new way of life. “The tulips are red, a darker crimson toward the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there.”

In Gilead, color plays a role in one’s new identity in this society. This is similar to American society where only a piece of your identity defines how you are treated by an overwhelming majority of people in the country. The color of your skin as well as your gender is immediately confined to what history has shaped every race and gender to be. This causes the identity of each individual to be lost in an endless swarm of stereotypes.

This has been done through laws and systems that create loopholes in many to prevent people at the bottom of the American hierarchy from an adequate and humane lifestyle. Roe V Wade., the law protecting a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body in terms of abortion in every state was overturned last June in 2022. Now in more than nearly half the states abortions are either completely banned or banned after 6-18 weeks of pregnancy. One can assume Christian ideologies play a role in this recent decision of the Supreme Court. Many who are in support of the abortion ban argue against basic human rights with their Christian interpretation of what they think the reproduction process should look like. Often blaming only women for the result of an act, sometimes forced, between two people where only she will suffer the consequence. While simultaneously shaming women for having children out of wedlock enforcing this idea that women should only have sex if they’re married. However, Gilead contradicts this idea by making the Wives infertile.

We see a similar tactic of oppression used in Gilead when Janine gives her testimony of being gang-raped at the age of 14. The Handmaids begin chanting that it is Janine’s fault for being raped because she ‘led them on’ Atwood uses this scene to highlight the stupidity of this reasoning that we still hear typically from the conservative viewpoint in a way that is almost comical. The colors of American society have for generations, since the beginning of what America is now, installed oppression on all races except the white race. Without this unjust system, the current people in power would not hold that power. At least not here. Slavery of the African American race, similar to Gilead, was implemented through physical and mental abuse. One of the tactics was also weaponizing Christianity, forcing the Africans to believe that if they did not obey and sacrifice their lives to better theirs, there would be far worse consequences from a higher power.

In America, we see similar loopholes that we see in Gilead preventing people at the bottom of the hierarchy from reaching the top—for example, voter restriction laws. When black men were given the right to vote in 1870 southern states created loopholes that would disproportionately remove black voters. Loopholes like literacy tests understanding that African Americans were for centuries prohibited from reading and poll taxes knowing that African Americans were starting to make a living for themselves, automatically making them poor. Atwood uses multiple parts of history to demonstrate the cruel and dehumanizing way societies are run. She highlights the universal issue of gender inequality in her writing in a thoughtful way that the reader can not breeze through, like many do with the current media, but has to sit and digest. B