In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood counterposes the neglect of her contemporary experience with the autocratic rule of the futuristic Gilead. By escalating the quality of female alienation, the portrait isolates the dynamic of a more profound sense of gender estrangement that is often ignored in the present experience. Critical to the vision is a transitional phase of pornomarts that offers potency to the retrospective depiction of Gilead. Even in enjoying the company of Nick, the novel still engages in a backwards glance to an era before Gilead. The full character of her sketch suggests that female oppression is a social condition that extends way beyond the individual acts of mistreatment. Even in projecting beyond the particular, Atwood does not reduce Offred's struggle to ideology. Her personal challenge is not emblematic. Offred succumbs to the complete influence of her desire. But Atwood underlines sexual politics that proceeds from such a concrete understanding. In the intensity of her conflict she surpasses the rigidity of her mother while, at the same time, ultimately recognizing the hard lessons inherent in the women's movement. There is something fundamental about her enslavement to time. She recognizes such a dominant principle in her emptiness that is exaggerated in Gilead. Due to the all encompassing aspect of her desire, her disassociation from self allows her to confront the massive potency of her own hunger. The image is partially captured when her breakfast egg is dropped. The shell collapses. Just as her desire emerges in this opening, the massive property of her feeling cannot be expressed in her faith in Nick. The absurd explosiveness of the salvaging realizes the manifestation of desire as brutality. Just as her desire for Nick starts to obliterate the traces of her allegiance to Luke, so this brutality asserts a sense of her own dominance that Atwood only sly admits. The full horror of a Gilead is somewhat muted in this narrative. Her collaboration is vague and apparently suppressed. How else can we have the results of her inquiry, the tale, without some kind of faith in Nick's providence.

By facing her fundamental condition, Offred carves out an experience that cannot be shared. Nevertheless, she guards her chosen role of story teller. Such a task is radically absent in the institutions of Gilead as if Atwood cannot create a society that would be an actual threat to Offred's integrity. Nevertheless, Gilead delineates the very real terms of her seduction. There is an almost perverse identification with her persecutors. She humanizes their influence. At the same time, her path seems to resist the intent of Gilead. The reader is offered a disquieting comfort amidst the apparent chaos.

Offred contemplates an escape from the restrictions of Gilead. She takes its symbolism as an evocation of rebelliousness. "'What if I were to come at night, when he's on duty alone-though he would never be allowed such solitude-and permit him beyond my white wings. What if I were to peel off my red shroud and show myself to him, to them, by the uncertain light of the lanterns?'"(21). The reverie inspires by the evocation of the "beyond". There the light might be fully revealing way beyond the limited glimpses of Gilead. Only under the lantern is such a way suggested, as its very imperfection offers completion of the tension provided between the "white wings" and the "red shroud". The limited light makes it possible to contemplate a reversal of the imagery offered by Gilead. She can show herself by making the images express her intent. Complementing the phallic imposition she finds complement for her image: "If they think of a kiss, they must immediately think of the floodlights going on, the rifle shots." In the literal qualities of the imagery, the psychological conditioning has been successful in rearranging the "natural" order of satisfaction. The kiss immediately elicits the allegiance to the state. The further reward of loyalty is the allotment of "a Handmaid of their own." Offred works to counteract the possession by the state: " I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It's like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, [...]" The immediacy of her gesture is indicated by the development from "a little" to "the full". Like the ripples of water in a pond, the motion is concentric and escalating. Her least movement can provoke such an intense feeling on the part of the male observer. The confession appears to confirm the supposed consent that the observer takes from such a view. Due to this characterization, the smallest natural variation that he can detect is an indication of intention on her part, as if she desires him to look. She feels the skirt sway as an extension of an intention that informs the initial movement on her part. The characterization of the scene suggests an entire coincidence between the showing on the part of the woman and the seeing on the part of the man. The expression of his "forbidden" desire is established as a response to her physical query. Since she is described as aware of all aspects of this effect, she essentially replies to her own question. She tells him that it is permitted to watch. Further, the satisfaction for his desire is expected by the terms with which she makes sense of the experience, and the details that Atwood offers to complete this picture. Atwood's description is a disturbing accompaniment to a "male" version of the scene. On that view, the succeeding actions on Offred's part are an indication of subsequent levels of consent to the man. The image seems to reverse the role of authority exercised by the man. He is described "from behind a fence". By this image, he would appear to suffer the constraint of the society. But the metaphor is entirely inaccurate. The women performs behind the fence. Even her garments are themselves an indication of her overall imprisonment; she is forced to wear the "full red skirt" by Gilead. If she is already living "behind [the] fence", how can a reader accept her intent as credible. In fact, she adds to the enclosure by the aspects of her performance down to the least detail. Granted she may deny the "bone" to the salivating male but to what purpose. Gilead already gloats over the inability to satisfy her desire. And the real character of the authority offers an exquisite satisfaction to its male collaborators. She denies Gilead by accepting its terms for her expression. The "tease" goes along with a traditional dominant expectation. In that narrative a stronger male can overcome the wall imposed by the tease. If the woman endorses this tale, then she appears to agree to the terms of her violation. The double metaphoric ascription, the "thumbing of the nose" and "the dog with the bone" does as much as formulate the terms of consent. It also diminishes the importance of a woman seeking acknowledgment from a man in offering him the opportunity to reply to a gesture on her part. On this dominant viewpoint, she can't help but make an offer. Any other gesture on her part, even her resistance, will only be a sign of further agreement. If she seeks a creative response on his part, such a response is contradicted by the notion that she is carried along by the described process. Moreover, the pull felt by Offred would be as powerful as that very forbidden desire displayed by the canine-like captive male. She may derive pleasure from telling a man what she likes. But can she influence herself in the same way? The depiction offers greater restriction on her ability to influence men on what they might call natural. The scene only offers a stamp of "natural" approval to the dominant state of affairs.

Offred extends her fealty to this phallic regime: "I hope they get hard at night and have to rub themselves against the painted barrier, surreptitiously." Even Atwood ignores the potency of

her symbolic creation. The gun has been substituted for what is already a metaphor in this economy, the penis (what is "hard" and what is "rubbed"). Both associated images are meant to affirm a metonymic connection that is entirely belied by the description of "shooting" and the overall authoritarian form of the society. The social order allows the gun to stand in for the phallus as the key mode of interpretation. The original sexual imagery is itself only part of an economy among symbols. Comments about the male sex organ only serve to affirm a condition of overall male dominance even in contemporary readers. You cannot undercut a symbolic effect by appearing to effect its real manifestation. Offred's shadow is the source of her actual appearance. "They have no outlets except themselves, and that's a sacrilege. There are no more magazines, no more films, no more substitutes: only me and my shadow." That is what she is trying to challenge, the symbolic imposition. The actual penis is already a substitute, a stand-in for what is symbolic and overreaching in the regime. The gun is appropriately phallic because its use indicates satisfaction. But even the threat suggests an inherent satisfaction; saving produce more incentive than spending. Atwood ironically notes this confusion: "The young ones are often the most dangerous, the fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time" (20). Rita interprets this "spontaneity": "Everything is meant"(21). The source of the symbolic is not a further instance of symbolism but rather in how in meaning, the symbolic totality can imply "everything"

Atwood engenders a mythic horror that surrounds the protected space of Gilead. This protection extends both in place and time. Outside of the protection, in a world of the past, men appear ready to ravage women. There are even remnants of that past outside of the "egg". Offred's horror proceeds from the conditions under which she appears to have liberated her desire. "If it's a story I'm telling, I have control over the end" (39). To break from the attachment to the stories told to her gives her story an intensity that inflames her passion. But the fear of abandonment under these conditions becomes all the more ravaging. In a sense these are the conditions of her desire. To consider the utter totality of passion, she needs to contemplate the effects of its withdrawal. Any experience separate from desire, from this hunger, becomes impossible. Somewhat corresponding to this enormity of want is the vigilance that seems to be a character of Gilead. There is always a danger of slipping back into the past, "Nothing changes instantaneously" (56). The past exists as the vagueness of narrative outside of the shell. "Women were not protected then" (24). The "rules" of the former era were too indefinite in offering the needed security: "I remember the rules, rules that were not spelled out but every woman knew. Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door" (24) Gilead then is a more intense application of the initial order. And the myth always sustained itself at the "edge of print" (57). There the monstrous image haunts the night. The personality is entirely a product of this "story": "Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble" (24) . It is not a motorist who actually is in trouble. The assumption of the teller (pretend) is built into the story. The warning takes on a particularly personal bent: " If anyone whistles, don't turn around. Don't go to a laundromat, by yourself, at night" (24). The generalization brings to life an actual bogey man. And her jaunt is to a laundromat, a journey of such meager intention. The brutality is part of the institutions of Gilead. "There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underestimate it" (24). Even in the rigidity of Gilead, there is still the influences of tourist. "Their hair is uncovered and their face is exposed, in all its darkness and sexuality" (28). Desire is associated with darkness, faintness of light.

Gilead's contradiction appears to emerge at its fringes. There the remnants of a society before Gilead still threaten. "There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew" (56). The story could have easily been culled from the time before Gilead. The progression is from the shocking results to the agents of such deeds, "unidentified men". And in these acts they rob the identities of the women. Already, they are "other women". Offred extends the space of the stories: "The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives." But in her contact with her past, she already invades the world of the imagination. Even Nick is described as the "man made of darkness"(161). She surrenders herself to this world of shadow. "We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom" (57). In this edge, she subdues the noxious effect of the stories. But the atmosphere permeates. There is an ambiguous quality to her assertion: "We lived in the gap between the stories" (57). She fills this gap with her nostalgic remembrances of Luke. The gap creates a further opening where she permits her desire to crytallize.

In her hotel rendez-vous with Luke, she attempts to find an immortality in the transience of the experience. The apparently sordid nature of the meeting is redeemed by his "pledge" to make her real. "In the afternoons, when Luke was still in flight from his wife, when I was still imaginary for him." She is imaginary precisely because she attaches herself to his recognition. At the same time, she creates a delight in the imaginary that appears to bring to life all her associated excitement with regards to Luke. Her devotion provide the reality of the scene. Without such a commitment, the scene appears somewhat hollow. In a sense, Luke is somewhat secondary to this excess. The blouse and scarf represent tangible evidence of her encounter. "I can remember what I wore, each blouse, each scarf." Her attachment to these mementoes offer the certainty that seems to elude her in her other memories. Her recollection is framed by a resolution in "solidity": "Before we were married and I solidified." Her tribute to marriage appears to lend support to all her evenings waiting for Luke in the hotel room. The imaginary self is rendered as real in this rendition. Even these objects only reawaken her frustration in having to wait for Luke. This is reflected in her nervous movement around the room: "I would pace, waiting for him, turn the television on and off [...]" Her actions express a desire to still this disquiet. The motion with the television is entirely mechanical and measured by the states on and off. Her use of perfume takes these actions again to the level of a cherished remembrance: "[I would] dab behind my ears with perfume [..]" The perfume is mystical. Even its name, "Opium" The tag line "Toutes les femmes s'addonnent a Opium" underlines her surrender as a form of addiction. Again the physical form of the bottle might counteract this phantasm, except she is seized by these souvenirs. the sum of these objects locks her into the amorous bond.

The feeling of anticipation is transferred from the immediacy of her wait to her general emotional state. "I was nervous. How was I to know how he loved me?" Her doubt is formidable, and she is offered little reassurance due to her confusion. She becomes both dependent on his response and is without a clear sign as to his attitude. Moreover, her question both admits to the intensity of her feeling and attempts to hide her doubts whether he actually reciprocates that feeling. She works to dismiss her doubt in a more general fashion. " It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just?" With the change in number from I to we, she is further diminishing her expectations, almost to suggest that this simply a general pattern to which she is submitting. Already giving over to such a reduction in her fever, she yields to a further diminishing of person in the shift from we to they. The gender identification is further surrendered to a shared casualness. "Though at that time men an women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit." The image of the suit makes light of her involvement and makes her risk equal to his, even if he has split his interest between his first wife and Offred. Under such conditions, a potential loss of his affection seems like no big deal, something that she could absorb without any sense of defeat. This is her horror that has been depicted with such a nonchalance that it only underlines how deeply she is already attached to him. But it is an expression that is denied by the supposed realities before the imposition of Gilead. Under such description it marks the extreme of neglect that she suffers under in this ideal.

With the massive extent of her feared letdown, his arrival thus ushers an explosion of her desire. "The knock would come at the door; I'd open with relief, desire. He was so momentary, so condensed." Just as his succor is offered her, it is more or less withdrawn. The meeting can hardly make up for the depth of her fear. This provides for the full characterization of her desire: "And yet there seemed no end to him." Her reduction to this moment engenders her infinite projection as she discovers the profundity of her passion. Only by contemplating this emptiness can she extend the all encompassing nature of her longing. The "endless" quality of her fervor is the very reply to her former wonder. But even that limitless vision is primarily part of her point of view. The physical contact appears to offer her the desired reply: "We would lie to in those afternoons beds, afterwards hands on each other, talking it over." The reference, "it" is deliberately vague. Her need for acknowledgment is replaced by their exalted hopes. The "hand on each other" is nothing less than "there seemed no end to him". But the substitution has dispelled her initial skepticism in this dominating reality. The previously described "marriage" becomes the locus for negotiation of her emotions: "Possible, impossible. what could be done?" The question has a complete clarity of resolution. So Gilead is offered to minimize the extent of her commitment to the situation. "We thought that we had such problems." The "such" ends up dissolving the distinction between her anticipation and his need to firm up his decision to divorce his wife. Just as she appears immersed in the depths of her desire, her demands are exchanged for the legal requirements of his life. So her love has been reduced to a "problem". With the inability to realize her creation, how can she possibly claim happiness. Again Gilead is invoked to exaggerate the efficacy of their communication. "How were we know that we were happy?" Indeed their happiness could have been explored and recognized. But their coincidence is assumed by the intensity of their conjugation. In this realm the marriage finds its complement in the endless touch, as well as the belief that they had problems. The touch is registered as overwhelming. As apparently forbidden, the pair are driven to an inevitable. Such is the distraction from the actual influence that her desire uncovers.

Her intimacies with Nick provoke a similar range of emotion:

He's undoing my dress , a man of darkness, I can't see his face and I hardly breathe, hardly stand and I'm not standing. his mouth is on me, his hands. I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long. I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never ending. (161)

Her sense of loss "it's been so long" increases her susceptibility to this emotion. The coming together bears the same endlessness of touch remarked on in her encounter with Luke. Both experiences provoke a vitality in her that is not limited to her narrative recollection. She admits to making up this story. But she had made the same remark in calling her actions with the Commander a reconstruction. It is all reconstruction and conspiracy. Her testimony is built on the connection to the past: "I'm alive in my skin, again [...]". But the temporal reference is contingent on an intensity of passion. The two become somewhat interchangeable, as if the reference to the past is simply a way of evoking an eternity of passion. The endlessness is classically without beginning or end so it even breaks with the connection to the past. Once the desire has attained this intensity Offred longs for his touch: "We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger." The reference to medieval romance makes the feeling part of another story, and in the reference the feeling gains a legitimacy. It is an appetite, but it is all engaging. In some respects, it threatens the alleged intent of the narrative, that Offred has a tale to tell. There is faith that the two are indeed the same. The passion is the tale; otherwise, there is no story to survive its experience, it primary telling.

Atwood explores the exhilarated feeling that she ascribes to Offred's feeling. "Falling in love, I said." In the experience, the lover is swept up by the experience. She gives in to the feeling because of the associated delight. But there is a mixture of confusion and surrender in her attitude as she does not know where the feeling will take. She embraces the risk. "Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How did he have make such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill a whim" ( ) She senses its importance as a counter to the potential detriment. This sincerity appears to direct love's course: " It was on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing. It was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that" ( ) The expectation forced a norm; it would be too upsetting to entertain a mutant form, only a more intense alienation. She then accepts the terms of surrender. "Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women". The emphasis is on "fell" without a pause, an automatic gesture.. But if paused, then the suggestion is that the falling is done primarily for him, not her-a sacrifice. She explores the image while all the time questioning the extent of that sacrifice. "We believed in it, this downward motion, so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely" (225 ). She pushes this wonder into a contrary certainty as if this guarantees the reciprocal quality of the feeling. "God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner"(225-6). Even in examining the love in the particular, she is still evoking this damning passion whose yoke is incredible. "The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word made flesh" (226 ) . The love manifest itself independently of the individual instance. The abstraction sanctioned the surrender, by demanding its own commitment. It is a condition of utter susceptibility where the glimpse of such a feeling on her part causes her to have faith in the reality of the full emotion. "And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and it's hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and think I loved you, and the tense would be past, [...]" (226) The present could only be noted from a future vantage point, and time would be welded to this culmination and eventual reevaluation. She trades her time to his. Even her work play associated with "working it out" appears to be a "giving in" on her part. She makes such a concession but there is little recognition for such action. All the while, she clings to her confidence. "With that man, you wanted it to work, to work out. working out was what you sometimes did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved" (227) Her realization "most likely the man" is buried in the details of equal acquiescence. "[O]therwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise." Working out is a physical penance for her offence. There is no corresponding avowal on the man's response. Even her loss of Luke is treated with such nonchalance. "I was like that too. Luke was not the first man for me. And he might not have been the last. If he hadn't been frozen that way" (227). Even giving birth is treated as a further resignation on the part of the woman. "More waiting. Lady in waiting: that's what they used to call those maternity stores" (227). Like her love, she brings a monumental

commitment to such an event. She consoles herself in a vocation that often seems singular despite its communal origin. Now her desire literally becomes flesh. This points to the male appropriation in the initial metaphor. The feeling is incarnate precisely because of the female participation. It is not secondary to a religious belief. Rather, the word is flesh only by analogy with the actual birth. Offred delivers her integrity to Gilead because she has already done the same to the social order that precedes it. To have a full concept of her denial, she has to ignore the particular character of her interaction. Luke exists as a result of this belief, both in its primary abstraction and in the secondary capitulation on her part.

Gilead can impose itself on her sense of time since she is already in a state of anticipation. It is not Gilead that has made her numb to her experience. It appears that is the provision for her not feeling that she is a freak. But even her most clearly natural impulses are themselves felt in a secondary fashion. Gilead mocks her because the misogyny of the language has taunted her. She can only see herself by recognizing her imprisonment. To see herself as waiting in emptiness is almost to suggest that only a man can provide her liberation. "I could go to Nick's room, over the garage. As we have done before. I could wonder whether or not he would let me in, give me shelter. Now that need is real"(292). Inasmuch as she wanders, cut off from herself, she has no resources to resist her desire. He can quash her tale, render her without existence. And she seeks him in spite of this risk. She hopes her love can redeem the experience at any cost.

The brutality of the text serves as the mirror image of the procreative urge. Offred describes the killing of the cat with the sense of the impulse becoming incarnate: "That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real" (193). The transformation of the self is so potent: "That's one of the things that they do. They force you to kill within yourself" (193). The extremes of desire are now perfectly coincident with the violence that upholds Gilead.

The brutality becomes internal in the stark quality of Offred's isolation: "There's time to spare. This is one of the things that I wasn't prepared for-the amount of unfilled time. The long parenthesis of nothing. Time as white sound. If only I could embroider. Weave, knit, do something with my hands. I want a cigarette" (69).

Offred initially attempts to replenish her absence with memories of Luke and of her child. As time progresses under Gilead' tutelage, the balance changes and the raw emptiness dominates her memories. The depth of this isolation is so severe as to eventually block out these memories. The dissipation is coherent and all encompassing. She senses that she is becoming engulfed by her own forgetting. "I try to conjure up, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are" (193) Indeed, her longing sustains a projection into a supernatural recovery, her magic. She works to steel her resolve. But she is admitting to the effort that undercuts her recollection. "I need to remember what they look like. I need to hold their faces behind my eyes like pictures in a photo album" (193). The album is a record that protects her memory. It is also a book that closes, a memory of a memory. And this reflection delivers her to a more potent solitude. "But they won't stay still

for me, they move, and there's a smile and it's gone, their features bend and curl as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them"(193). The magic has resurrected the images only to burn them down to nothing. The blackness is abstract, a metaphysical sensation that pervades her spirit. What is initially a ghostly recreation becomes a horror, total abandonment.

Gilead engages in ritual the same absence that women were influenced to feel in the previous society. Ultimately, the blackness is so frightening because Offred has invested her memory with such an element of faith. She expects it to offer her comfort since she senses such a vacuum of self-assurance. Her nothingness is heartfelt. She has constantly avoided its incursions. Gilead adds to this quality of emptiness: "What we prayed for was emptiness, so that we could be worthy to be filled: with love, with grace, with love, with semen, with babies" (194). The vision is a highlighting of an apparently natural emptiness. Gilead provokes the roots of such an identity. It generalizes her need for male domination. The social formation reinforces the dominance of a male regime. It replaces the individual man with the state. But the style of devotion is equivalent. It touches every single experience. Even its denial, the blackness embraces servitude.

The actual imposition of order does not appear so ambiguous. The Wall offers its serious warning. The text passes over the reference to the hooks in horrific, but matter of fact terms. This is the incredible reminder of the torture. But Atwood carries through the inventory: "It's the bags over the heads that are the worst. Worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men look like dolls on which the faces have not been painted" (12). The wall affects by its artistry. It digests and transforms and then feeds back the very inspiration for its horror. More than the victim returning to his origins in the flesh, the Wall becomes part of the viewer. The terror-canvas touches by its creation, not by its realistic imagery. The citizen make the machine work internally, like the killing of the cat.

The disassociated self cannot reconcile these contradictions. They have uncovered an energy of the participant's nature. The energy is ultimately boundless, but sterile by its avowal. It needs a further performance. So the salvaging is the complement of Offred's desire. It is the response to the resultant numbness from shock overload. The viewer enters the game. The narrative accusation creates its own judgement: "It was brutal I will not offend your ears except to ay that one woman was pregnant and the baby died" (279). The reference to the baby actually shows no consideration to the actual circumstances. It is the apex of incitement. The abstraction inflames the relation to actual detail. Simply to imagine more is to involve the citizens in revenge. "A sigh goes up from us: despite myself I feel my hands clench. It is too much, this violation" (279). In the novel, Gilead is simply a prop. The disgust is registered as a present experience, in the time of the reader, not a future creation. Atwood maintains the sensational quality of the example. Offred is simultaneously violator, victim, and avenger. These are the very realities of the "crime". But it exists only for the enactment of the punishment. And the punishment is such an equivalent form of the initial act. The violation attains mythic form as it engenders a cycle of repetition. "The baby too, after what we go through. It's true; there's a bloodlust; I want to tear, gouge, rend" (279). Offred is entirely part of this ritual. When she later hears one of the accused deny the allegation, she wonders if it might be Luke or Nick. But her attraction is coincident with the revulsion. Both are instances of her intense participation. Her social interaction in Gilead provides an object equivalent to that found in the reader's contemporary experience.

Offred's experience of brutality is the realized expression of her desire. The released energy engages her devotion to Luke, her attachment to Nick, and her remembrance of her child. This explosiveness is entirely at the service of the narrative. "Oh God, obliterate me. Make me fruitful. Mortify my flesh, that I may be multiplied. Let me be fulfilled." (194). Self-negation stabilizes the eruption. "Some of them will get carried away with this. The ecstasy of abasement" (194). But the reference to the flesh is transferred to the description of force, the getting "carried away". All the movement is projected from a series of crafted images that cascade greater and greater intensities, all leading to the ecstatic. "I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or in my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light" (194). The disassociation is total. The curtain leads the progression where the light is always altered by the act of seeing. What is seen is entirely a property of the viewer. She no longer needs a separation of without and within. The feeling propels the picture. She appeals to the divine to encompass an integral reality. "I wish that you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything." (194). In like manner she tells Nick her actual name. She has revealed her godhead. "I tell him my real name and feel that I am known" (270). While existing in a weighty silence, she has made the spirit speak, given it word. The curtain in revelation offers the detail of performance "I pull the left-hand curtain so that it falls between us, across my face, and after a moment he walks on, into the invisibility behind the corner."(192) She exists in performance as she promises to reveal. So the love-making exhausts and renews. "We make love each time as if we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever" (269). The excess, the locus of her identity, is outside of herself: "And then there is, that too is a surprise, a gift" (269). In its form, the "gift" might offer the support for the associated feelings. Projecting beyond the two, the appeal is to the reader. All is rendered according to further shading:

I would like a light on somewhere, a candle perhaps stuck into a bottle, some echo of college, but anything like that would be too great a risk; so I have to make do with the searchlight, the glow of it from the grounds below, filtered through the white curtains which are the same as mine. I want to see what can be seen of him, take him in , memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his long sardonic revealing face.[my emphasis] (269)

Even the glow is subject to the frame of the curtains. This reinforces the association. Even the physical form (the line of his body) and the sweat are simply affirmations of the overall vision. Her remembrance is a complement to the gradually fading image of Luke. The light provides a snapshot, a tag for memory. The physical description simply guarantees the overall confidence of the tale. Even his face is a reflection of the ironic flavor of the portrait, too involved to betray her faith.