Shame, Fear, and Repression Theme Analysis

Gilead’s male leadership is obsessed with repressing women’s sexuality and keeping them “pure,” loyal, and subdued, even while the men in power abuse their authority to fulfill their own violently lecherous and often pedophilic whims. Agnes’s narrative, spanning her years in primary school through her young adulthood, models the mix of indoctrination, brutal punishment, and fear that Gilead uses to make women terrified of recognizing or exploring their own sexuality, and thus keeps them subdued and controlled. Through Agnes’s experience, the novel makes a broader narrative comment about how repressive regimes or societies use shame and fear to repress woman’s sexuality and make them submissive.

From a young age, Agnes and her fellow student are taught to fear their sexuality and the potential allure of their bodies. When Agnes is only six or seven, she and her female peers are taught in school that they are like valuable little flowers, and their purity and beauty is their “treasure,” suggesting that, in Gilead’s view, their principal value is in their pure, untarnished sexual potential. However, they are simultaneously taught that “the urges of men are terrible things and those urges need to be curbed” and that even as young girls their bodies are “snares and enticements […] the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust.” Thus, if they are not careful to never show any indecency, their “petals would be torn off and [their] treasure would be stolen”—in other words, they will be forcibly violated by men, which Agnes has nightmares about throughout her childhood. Gilead claims that even a young girl’s body is a dangerous thing which needs to be hidden, and implies that if one of them should be attacked or raped, it is their own fault for not being prudent enough. Agnes’s nightmares suggest that such teaching is so frightening and psychologically damaging that it traumatizes her. As Agnes grows older and enters puberty, noticing that her body is beginning to change and develop curves, she feels that she is “no longer a precious flower but a much more dangerous creature.” This does not create a sense of power but only additional fear, as she reflects: “The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it […] I was left feeling I would be better off without it.” Agnes’s pervasive fear of her own womanly body and wish that she did not have it at all again demonstrates the manner in which fear can be used to repress sexuality, as well as the trauma and self-contempt that results from such repression.

Although women in Gilead are valued primarily as sexual objects in their roles as wives or Handmaids, they are never taught that sex could possibly be enjoyable, since this could entice them to explore their desires on their own, demonstrating the manner in which a regime or system may repress women’s sexuality through denying any sense of pleasure. Gilead’s education system for women is vary wary of putting “too much emphasis on the theoretical delights of sex, [since] the result would almost certainly be curiosity and experimentation, followed by moral degeneracy,” suggesting that although the men of Gilead surreptitiously seek out sexual pleasure for themselves, women are forbidden from experiencing or even being aware of such pleasure, so as to further repress and control their sexuality. Young women like Agnes are forced into arranged marriages as soon as they have their first period, “before any chance encounter with an unsuitable man might occur that would lead to what used to be called falling in love or, worse, to loss of virginity.” Gilead’s treatment of women is engineered to remove any connection between pleasure and sexuality, especially through youthful experimentation or romance, so that they can exert more control and keep women more easily subdued.

When fear and denial of pleasure don’t work to keep women hemmed in and subdued, Gilead’s society casts tremendous public shame on any woman perceived to be unduly embracing her sexuality. Adultery is treated as the ultimate crime in Gilead, worse than murder, and is a capital offense. Agnes reflects, “death by stoning was not a fate anyone wanted for their children, and the stain of it on a family could be indelible.” The shame Gilead ascribes to women who have sex outside their legal bounds of marriage not only affects them, but also mars their family even after their death. Handmaids are the only women in Gilead permitted to have any sort of sexual contact outside of marriage, since they are temporarily assigned to wealthy men to have sex with them and bear children on behalf of their wives. Although infertility is at epidemic levels and many families rely on fertile Handmaids to produce offspring for them, Handmaids are treated as social pariahs and regarded as “sluts” and “untouchables.” Even though Gilead’s government legislates the use of Handmaids and needs them to sustain the population, society reviles these women. This not only demonstrates the shame attached to women’s sexuality, but adds to the fear and stigma that ensures wives will only ever express their sexuality in the privacy and strict confines of their relationships with their husbands. The deep societal stigma and shame Gilead attaches to women’s sexuality models the manner in which a system, institution, or regime may seek to keep women repressed and subdued.