The Jezebel Section

Look at chapters 37-39 - the Jezebel section - with the following in mind.

Explore attitudes towards women and sex.
Margaret Atwood, the author of the book The Handmaid’s Tale. She is a radical feminist and believes in all the ideologies that have been formed about men towards women. Atwood illustrates some of the beliefs and ideologies of feminism through different ways throughout the novel. Atwood reveals her radicalism many a times by expressing in her novel that all men treat women unfairly and dictate their every move. Atwood uses a female narrator, who is named Offred (this is not her real name) to show that there is no democracy between men and women, it is a dictatorship. Dictatorships run by men. It values over powering women and being persistent in dominating them.
In the chapters 37 to 39, a place called Jezebel is revealed. The term ‘Jezebel’ derives from the Bible. Jezebel was a woman who passed on iniquity upon the kingdom of the king Ahab. Also the term ‘Jezebel’ is also used to define and describe a rebellious and disobedient woman. Jezebel is a place which consists of women who are solely used for pleasure and fornication. The term fornication is used to describe best what occurs in Jezebel because the commanders are not religiously and lawfully married to the women. This place is evidently opposing and abusing the rules and policies of the government of Gilead. In this section Atwood uses present tense to describe Offred’s experiences of Jezebel. This makes the experiences more effective because for the readers it makes moments come alive as Offred explores and becomes captivated in the contrasting ideas of this place. Up to chapter 36, Atwood expressed her views through using the voice of Offred by conveying that women are mainly used for childbearing. These particular sections focuses on alternative roles for women.
In chapter thirty seven, as Offred is revealing what she observes says, ‘The women are sitting, lounging, strolling, leaning against one another.’ The finite verb ‘are’ is used to emphasise the present tense that Atwood is using to describe Offred’s experience. The finite verb ‘are’ is joined with auxiliary verbs to depict the women’s movements. The auxiliary verbs such as ‘...sitting, lounging, strolling...’ convey a sense of freedom. This is something that the women of Gilead do not have. They don’t have freedom to, they have freedom from. The verbs are portraying that the women are free to be however they want. They do not need any one’s permission to be in any state they wish to be. This expresses how the women of Jezebel differ from the women of Gilead. Atwood has made this Jezebel place to be hidden and a place not many people know about. Women can do as they please in this place. This connotes that Atwood believes, women only rarely have some sort of freedom and that too when men want nothing but pleasure and sex from them. So in theory, women are still not free. They are tied down by one duty or the other.
Another way the women are describes in this section are through clothing. In the society of Gilead, women have to dress in certain colours depending on their status. This therefore makes their status in society prominent to everyone. They are divided and women of different classes do not mix with one another unless for professional reasons. Offred continues to set the scene of Jezebel and then describes the clothing of the women. She says, ‘The women on the other hand are tropical, they are dressed in all kinds of bright festive gear.’ This is just one quote to describe the dressing of the women in Jezebel. Offred carries on great detail describing the different kinds of outfits. The idea of women all dressed differently emits a sense of individuality and originality. They are not under any certain status, position or categorised. The adjective ‘bright’ and ‘festive’ are just some of the adjectives used to describe the clothing. The adjective ‘bright’ portrays a feeling of happiness and the importance of light in a very dark place. In this case the importance of ‘excitement’ in a dull society like Gilead. The adjective ‘festive’ displays a sense of high spirits and energy. This connotes positivity and the occurrences of different things happening at once. Festive connotes festivals and the usual conventions of a festival are many events taking place on one occasion. This implies that there are different events occurring in Jezebel and different in the actual society of Gilead. Although these are just descriptions of clothing, it still conveys ideologies about the opposing environment, Jezebel.
In the opening paragraph of chapter 39 Offred speaks about how she notices and observes the desires of the commander to have sexual intercourse with her. ‘The commander has a room key...he shows it to me, slyly. I am to understand.’ The use of the adverb, ‘slyly’ indicates that the commander has to be sneaky and conniving to get what he wants. He has to be shrewd to fulfil his sexual needs. Offred then carries on expressing her emotions on how she feels when the commander is so physically close to her. She says, ‘But it’s no good, I lie there dead like a bird. He is no monster, I think.’ Atwood uses the simile, ‘like a bird’ to express what kind of feelings Offred is undergoing at this moment in her life. The thought of a bird brings freedom and liberty to mind but as soon as the word ‘dead’ is replaced before it, it suddenly emits a frozen, insensitive and a cold feeling. It’s almost as if Offred has got ‘used’ for sex so many times that now the feeling of being objectified has desensitised within her. After describing the commander as a ‘monster’ which gives him animalistic features, Offred uses the personal noun ‘I’ and abstract noun ‘think’ these two nouns convey a sense of confusion and perplexity. It’s almost as if Offred is not sure whether the Commander is a human with feelings or a evil heartless monster.
In conclusion, after having stated several ideologies expressed in some passages of the novel, it has come to notice that Margaret Atwood has a very negative view about men and their attitudes towards women. She expresses these views in harsh ways, making situations sound extreme and unreasonable which put ‘all’ men in a very pessimistic light. Atwood has made men look like users. It’s either using women for childbearing, using women for sex and pleasure or using women for other various things such as cooking and cleaning. She has somehow in every way possible shown that women are only used by men, their needed and perhaps not wanted as much. There is a different between want and need. Both have different feelings behind them.