Adam and Eve


"But I suffer not a woman to teach, not to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.'
'For Adam was formed first, then Eve.'
'And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.'" (p. 221, The Handmaid's Tale)

Eve was formed, as we can see in the book of Genesis, to be Adam's "helper."
He was formed first. This, sadly, is not a "first is the worst, second is the best" kind of thing.

Eve is allegedly seen as someone not to usurp authority over the man, but to be "in silence."
This very well could be to prevent potential rebellion, and the last thing Aunt Lydia would want is the Handmaids to use empowerment as a way to overthrow the Republic. This is an example of the continued allusions to the Bible being misconstrued and manipulated into the new teachings of Gilead. If this, our 21st century America, were to allow total patriarchy to reign (as it has before), women would yet again be re-silenced. Our voices are finally becoming heard again. This novel repeatedly shows and proves the very real threat of a dystopian society in which women are insignificant and submissive. Aunt Lydia is a unique character, in my opinion, because I genuinely feel like she may not have been one to pick the lifestyle she is characterized in, either. Which leads me to question... where did she come from, and how did she get the position she is in? I may have missed that detail, but it sounds like it's something that could be significant to her place in "educating" (or brainwashing) the Handmaids.

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 9, 2017 at 10:46 AM

    I am glad you took a deeper look into this, because I found Aunt Lydia and the other aunts to be quite interesting regardless of them not being the main focus. From what I understood, the aunts gained their position by being single and void of sin prior to the Gilead's uprise, essentially and generally speaking. If you were married to a man that had not previously been divorced, you became one of the wives, and if you were sinful (AKA gay or single with a child out of wedlock) or married to a previously divorced man, you became a handmaid. There are a number of characters, like Aunt Lydia, that show small signs of their underlying disdain for the system. Their surface level actions in view of this underlying struggle show that maybe, like Offred, they were facing an internal turmoil and would have had a similar story to tell had they taken the opportunity to document their day to day experience that would one day be uncovered by the future generations.

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