Here is the answer and explanation to the question What is the importance of the garden in The Handmaid’s Tale? What would a thesis detailing its symbolic and thematic importance look like?
What is the importance of the garden in The Handmaid’s Tale? What would a thesis detailing its symbolic and thematic importance look like?
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The beautiful garden Serena Joy tends symbolizes the roles women are relegated to in The Handmaid’s Tale. Ironically, for all the leadership and intelligence she showed bringing Gilead into being, the new state’s existence means that Serena Joy and other talented women like her are reduced to time-killing tasks like growing flowers. Their world has become constricted, hemmed in:
Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for.
It is only from a “distance” that the garden looks like “peace.” The gardens are part of the false façade of what Gilead wants to be, a place where women are content with their subordinate roles. Up close, Offred senses Serena Joy’s intense discontent and anger at how the revolution has cheated her:
One day I came upon Serena Joy, kneeling on a cushion in the garden, her cane beside her on the grass. She was snipping off the seed pods with a pair of shears. … She was aiming, positioning the blades of the shears, then cutting with a convulsive jerk of the hands. Was it the arthritis, creeping up? Or some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers?
The implication is that Serena Joy takes out her anger and aggressive desire to castrate the men who have constricted her on her garden flowers.
Yet as a symbol of womanhood, the growing, fertile garden, though meant to put women in their place, is also a symbol of female power waiting to burst forth. As Offred puts it:
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
The garden speaks to the reality that the women of Gilead won’t be silenced forever and reveals the reality that women cannot be held down forever.
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