"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, March 9, 2020

Favorite Characters: Emily (The Handmaid’s Tale)


I still haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, but the TV series has definitely had its ups and downs. Some truly spectacular, unnerving, heavy stuff, and some that’s unfortunately sloppy and poorly-conceived. However, for me, Emily is an aspect of the show that’s always strong, and my only complaint where she’s concerned is that I often wish we have more of her than we get (Emily-related spoilers.)

When we first meet her, she’s known as Ofglen, a fellow Handmaid and June’s walking partner. June is equal parts disgusted by and wary of Ofglen, who she thinks is an absolute Gilead true believer. She exchanges ritualistic propaganda slogans with Ofglen, afraid that the Handmaid might inform on her, while all the while she wonders how any woman could actually believe in Gilead’s oppressive regime.

But of course, Ofglen/Emily isn’t a true believer any more than June is. After we get that initial reveal, that along with not drinking the Gilead Kool-aid, Emily is actively involved with the resistance movement, I went back and rewatched her first scenes, and all the signs are there. Although she says the “appropriate” words and pretends to be a good little Handmaid right along with June, it’s written all over her face and in her voice that 1) she knows it’s nothing but repugnant propaganda and 2) she’s afraid of June figuring out how she feels about it.

So now, not a true believer. In addition to being female (therefore a target of Gilead’s subjugation no matter what) and fertile (therefore prime Handmaid material,) Emily is also a lesbian. Her wife is Canadian and their son has dual citizenship, so when things started to crumble, they were able to escape, but Emily was kept back under new laws that refused to recognize their marriage. Being a “gender traitor” is particularly despised in Gilead, but while others caught in “sin” are killed and strung up on the wall, Emily’s fertility is too valuable to Gilead for them to execute her, at least not quickly. When she’s found having a relationship with a Martha, Emily is subjected to female genital mutilation to “control” her “urges,” then shortly thereafter sent back to a Commander’s home.

This is the experience that breaks Emily. She tries to keep her head down and avoid further retribution, but she can’t manage to do that. She’s boiling over with rage and shame at what’s been done to her, and she slips into a “nothing to lose” mentality that can never be reigned in for long. It admittedly stretches credibility that she’s able to survive in Gilead so long – as much as Gilead needs Handmaids, it needs control more, and anyone without Regular Cast Member Plot Armor would have been killed several times over – but she absolutely suffers for it. After she snaps and kills a Guardian, she’s sent to the Colonies, where she’s forced to clean up radioactive waste in a prison labor camp and expects to undergo a drawn-out, agonizing death. But an explosion in Gilead results in an urgent need for more Handmaids, and Emily and others are brought back again.

From there, it’s a series of Commanders, incidents, and narrow misses until, after a desperate attack on Aunt Lydia, Emily’s current Commander helps her escape. This last season has shown Emily as a refugee in Canada, trying to figure out how to recover what she can of her old life with her family. But even in relative safety, it’s not just Emily’s past trauma and physical mutilation that continues to pain and threaten her: because she escaped with a Commander’s baby, she becomes embroiled in an international incident whereby Gilead attempts to “negotiate” with Canada for the return of “Baby Nicole,” and there’s a question of whether “known criminals” from Gilead should be subject to extradition. Just as Emily gets out of the viper’s nest, they want to pull her back in.

Through it all, Emily survives, sometimes fighting with everything she has and sometimes just drifting downstream as she gives into exhaustion and hopelessness. Her reactions to what happens to her aren’t always “smart” or “logical,” and she doesn’t always act in her best interests, but even if some of the twists of her plots feel implausible, her part within them never does. She always feels believable as a woman under intense strain and torture just doing what she can at each moment, whatever that might be.

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