A Rough Commentary: Falling Women

During a scene in Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Offred has a discussion with her commander on love. Amidst one of their frequent ‘scrabble sessions’, the commander brings up the topic of love, sending Offred on a long tangent down memory lane. Love had almost become extinct in Gilead, due to the strict rules placed on women. The mention of love therefore caused Offred to reminisce about the beauty and pain that love is capable of bringing. Through the use of diction, metaphors, and imagery, Atwood describes every woman’s battle with love through Offred’s eyes, an everlasting memory despite the dominance of their loveless society.

Offred draws upon the commonly used expression ‘to fall in love’.  Here, Atwood uses diction to associate the emotion of love to the “downward motion” of falling. The verb ‘to fall’ is repeatedly mentioned as she describes how “falling women” were “falling in love”. The use of associating love with an act like falling, gives the reader a sense of the freedom and unruliness that comes with being in love. Not only is it “lovely, like flying” but it is also “so dire, so extreme, so unlikely”. Only an act like falling can connect the excitement of being in love to the uncontrollable path it may take. It is both dangerous and exhilarating. By calling women in love “falling women”, Offred ties together the act of falling and the impact it has on the woman. The constant repetition of the verb ‘to fall’ brings significance to the fact that it is a constant process. Women in love are continuously falling, and are continuously facing both the thrills and turbulence of being in love. Offred herself can relate to this continuous falling, for even though she is separated from her loved one, she is still a ‘falling woman’.

Atwood presents a juxtaposing image to ‘falling’ in her comparison of love to God. Her metaphor, ‘God is love’ provides an interesting twist to the ideology of love. They twist the saying ‘God is love’ to portray the spirituality of love, and how it is a belief and a power rather than an emotion. Through the use of diction, Atwood portrays how the roles have reversed, and how love is now the dominating power. Offred stated “the more we believed in Love”, where the capitalization of the term ‘love’, and the concept of believing in it rather than experiencing it brings to it a religious sense, that Love is more powerful than any other emotion. By calling a loved one an ‘incarnation’, religious power is brought to a loved one, where a partner becomes the embodiment of the spiritual belief in Love.  The image of love being heaven juxtaposes the idea of falling in love, for now the falling women are falling upwards, toward heaven. These two contrasting images, of up versus down, give the reader a sense of the rollercoaster women face when dealing with love.

Through the use of abstract pronouns, Atwood uses diction to make a connection between Offred’s rant, and her own love life. When describing the pains of love, Offred uses ‘you’ instead of I, when it is clear that she is speaking from past experience. She says that “You would be filled with wonder… and you would know too why you friends had been evasive about it”. The constant use of ‘you’ rather than ‘I’ disconnects Offred from the subject she is speaking of; however, such emotional statements can only be formed from past experience. Atwood also uses diction to create the disconnection by using ‘they’ rather than the name of a man. Offred asks, “Who knows that they do… Who knows what they say… Who can tell what they really are?”. It is apparent that these descriptions of so-called hypothetical situations were formed from some previous memory of Offred’s, for no hypothetical situation can be described with such detail. Through the use of abstract pronouns, Atwood adds a sense of obscurity to the scene, showing how love holds an enduring mark on the memories of ‘falling women’, even when forced to abide by a loveless society.

Atwood’s use of diction and metaphors in this excerpt portrays the prevalence of love in a frigid world. Although societal regulations can prohibit the act of love, the memory and power still withholds in the memory of those that have experienced it. This ‘act of falling’, this ‘spiritual power’, is too fierce to be forgotten. Although trying to form a disconnection, it is still evident that Offred’s previous experiences with love have made their mark. In a loveless society like that of Gilead, holding on to the memory of love, and continuing the act of this ‘downward motion’ are all that falling women have to hold on to the emotional thrills of love.