In horror, the female body is the fulcrum upon which the greater plot pivots.
May iconic films of the genre—Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th—perpetuate binary ideas of “purity” and “corruption,” particularly as it relates to women.
In these movies, the female heroine survives not simply because of her grit and perseverance, but also because her virginal purity (whether imagined or not) has allowed her to assess the dangerous situation in a way that her “promiscuous” peers are unable to do because of their focus on sex.
The politics of the female protagonist’s relationship to her own body—and the way that others react to it—transform into a test of survival. This heightened fear, and increasing likelihood of death, hinges upon whether or not the young woman in the story allows her body to “betray” her. It is only by separating herself from the supposedly inappropriate aspects of her biology that she can live.
While watching the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I kept feeling like I was watching a similar type of horror story.
The series elicits familiar waves of terror, distress, and disgust by heightening the turmoil of body horror. It is a production in which the female protagonist is, indeed, betrayed by her own biology and violently forced to pay for it.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the fascist theocracy of Gilead upholds the oppressive shackling of women—whether to the homes of the elite or to remote, isolated wastelands. The curbing of their rights is rationalized under the paternalistic guise of “protecting” its female citizens. The paradoxical aims of Gilead seek to “empower” women by removing their ability to choose how to exert bodily control. According to the dystopian political government, there is only one “right” way to have a female body—and they are willing to intervene with restrictive legal measures in order to enforce the “proper” rules and procedures of reproductive care.
In Linda Williams’ “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” she describes the tropes of the horror film, including the ways in which “the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain.”
Similarly, the existence of the female body in The Handmaid’s Tale proves punishing, rather than freeing. To be a woman in Gilead is to succumb to pure fear and pain; the female body is a canvas upon which the government viscerally castigates and remolds for “proper” consumption. To be biologically female is to call forth violence.
As a result, life in Gilead is, indeed, a horror film.
Critically, Williams links horror to the broader genre of “melodrama,” which she defines as “‘lapses’ in realism, ‘excesses’ of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile, emotions, and by narratives that seem circular and repetitive.”
Each episode of The Handmaid’s Tale employs dark, excessive “spectacle” and “displays of primal, even infantile, emotions” to convey the troubling manifestations of patriarchal fascism. As a visual spectacle of oppression, handmaids don white hoods and red robes to signify their fertility. They are carefully guarded and watched, reduced to “infantile” figures who must fulfill the “primal” and “repetitive” demands of the patriarch and his household.
The protagonist, Offred, exists in a numbing, circular narrative from which there is no escape. Her “choice” to become a handmaid is one of coercion. Living in Gilead, Offred lacks an infrastructure for bodily support and self-determination. She becomes a handmaid because it is the only option that offers her some semblance of security—and, even then, she knows that she will still have to sacrifice her physical and emotional autonomy.
Thus, she does not really have a choice. Her metaphorical home is on fire, forcing her to jump out the window, even as she knows that there is nothing to save her but the cold, hard ground.
As a result, Offred cannot find a home in her body because it is her body that has become traitorous. It is what has turned her into a form of cattle. At the same time, her sexuality—as linked to her reproductive abilities—has also “saved” her. In this way, The Handmaid’s Tale both subscribes to and subverts aspects of the horror genre.
When discussing horror, Williams explains, “the sadomasochistic teen horror films kill off the sexually active ‘bad’ girls, allowing only the non-sexual ‘good’ girls to survive.”
To look at The Handmaid’s Tale in its simplest form, this is not true of Offred: she does not live, technically, as a “non-sexual” being, therefore rendering her a “bad girl”—yet it is this very sexuality that allows her to survive.
Tellingly, Williams further says, “But these good girls become, as if in compensation, remarkably active, to the point of appropriating phallic power to themselves. It is as if this phallic power is granted so long as it is rigorously separated from phallic or any other sort of pleasure. For these pleasures spell sure death in this genre.”
To borrow Williams’ terms, Offred is both a woman who is “bad” and“good.” Her sexuality is not something she enjoys—it is something that is taken from her. She is sexualized because of her reproductive capacities, yet desexualized through violence.
Under the household of the Commander, Offred is always watched. She is raped at least once a month. Her body is not a home. It has become abstract—it functions in isolation from her.
Tragically, Offred seeks this abstraction because it is what keeps her sane. She consciously avoids the personalization that Adrienne Rich describes in “Notes Toward a Politics of Location”: “To write ‘my body’ plunges me into lived experience, particularity.”
Offred does not want to embrace this “my,” this private mode of being that contains a distinct, powerful history. Instead, what Offred and other handmaids pray for is “emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.”
Memories haunt her, weaken her. She attempts to embody an internal void, a lack, to fight the ways in which her body may betray her; to fully embrace her body, which contains the rich memory of what she once was, would render her senseless.
In this way, Offred is, indeed, what Williams would call one of horror’s “good girls.”
To note again, she is “rigorously separated from phallic or any other sort of pleasure.” To fight her oppression, she must psychologically detach from her body, which is physically subjugated by the patriarchal government.
As Offred explains, “My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.” She must create a self that does not exist in the body; she must create a self that is stronger than the home of her bones. It is the only way she will survive.
Analyzing the The Handmaid’s Tale through the lens of horror allows for a deeper, rather than reductive, look at its nuanced, powerful narrative. It advances a crucial truth: the oppression of women, whether real or make-believe, is horrific. It also allows for a multifaceted study into the ways in which women experience psychological and bodily imprisonment.
Notably, philosopher Michel Foucault compared the design of Jeremy Bentham’s penitentiary, the Panopticon, to Western society. Like the Panopticon’s prisoners, citizens operate as if they are constantly being watched. People follow daily routines while always aware of potential observation and disapproval from others. This suspicion normalizes their behavior because they fear possible retribution. The indiscernible and capricious nature of misogyny also functions like a Panopticon, reifying specific forms of living and establishing a cognitive form of imprisonment that impels women to “act” a certain way or risk ostracism—or death.
As such, an analysis of horror and its connection to the female body illustrates how a form of social rebellion emerges when women openly embrace the aspects of a body that cultural norms have socialized them not to love. There is a potency in making a space for oneself within the infrastructure of skin, bones, and blood—in finding respite within oneself. To be a truly subversive “final girl” is to have characters like Offred powerfully share their narratives as a source of power.
In this show, she has a formidable voice, one that speaks not only for herself, but for all women who have been silenced. She does not ignore the silence—she explains it.
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