Chapter 13

English Lit: Edexcel A Level The Handmaid's Tale, topic 2.5.1

Chapter 13 - Summary

Offred waits in her room to be called upon.

She says that she feels bored.
She compares herself to boredom in other forms, like caged animals, pigs being fattened to be killed and women in paintings.
She thinks about how she was drugged to sleep at the Red Centre. She chooses to do a pelvic floor exercise that Aunt Lydia taught her to do to prepare herself for childbirth.

Offred then thinks about her past. She remembers Moira as a Handmaid being brought to the same room she was in.
She remembers how they tried to hide their friendship and met secretively in the men's toilets to talk after witnessing the "Testifying" of Ofwarren (Janine) where she was blamed for confessing to being raped.

Her memory then changes to thinking about Luke and the first apartment they lived in.
But the memory turns into one of her attempted escape with her daughter, and the distressing moment they got caught.
The noise of a bell rouses her from her memory. She's aware that Cora is stood at her door.

Here are five key quotations from Chapter 13:

"These pictures [of nineteenth-century harems] were supposed to be erotic... they were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men"
Like the women in the pictures, Offred is in "suspended animation". She is also an object. She isn't being used - and she's unable to use the parts of herself that make her a woman rather than an object.

"Behind my closed eyes thin white dancers flit gracefully among the trees, their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds".
This simile suggests that Offred is like a dancer who is, on the one hand, very rehearsed in their job and, on the other hand, very restricted from letting go and flying free.

Janine … gang-raped... whose fault …?
Atwood draws on the much-discussed issue of whether women arousing men who later rape them are in some part responsible for the rape.
In 2005, a survey by Amnesty International found that lots of people thought a woman who was drunk or wearing revealing clothing when she was raped was responsible for the rape.

"I'm running, with her, holding her hand"
Offred's memory of running with her daughter is very vivid as it is in the present tense.
The reader relives Offred's fear as she and Luke try to escape with their daughter.
Atwood creates a vivid sense of Offred's state of panic from "She's too young" to "carried away" by using one long sentence over nine lines.