What 'The Handmaid’s Tale' teaches us about resistance through waiting

by Maria Kopke, Guest Editorial

Everything changed after 2020. Everywhere in the world, people were forced into a new reality, and we are still learning to adapt to it. Step one was realizing that there was no going back to a pre-pandemic world. Not everyone has moved past this step, but for those who have, step two is making the necessary changes, individually and collectively, so we can build a future that we can all fit into.

Some changes are less obviously necessary than others, but hopefully, we will pick up on as many of them as possible as we go along. I became aware of one, mostly by chance, which I think is not so clear. Let me go back a little bit:

In 2019, I was struggling to decide on what to write about for my dissertation, and, surprisingly, it was my playlist of show tunes that decided for me. I was listening to it on shuffle and Shrek’s “I know it’s today” started playing, followed by The Witches of Eastwick’s “Waiting for the music to begin”, followed by The Addam’s Family’s “Waiting”. This fortunate combination of songs about waiting, and particularly about waiting women, felt like a clue to what I should write about.

But what was it, exactly? “Waiting women in fiction” was hardly an original idea, neither was it groundbreaking to make the link between waiting women in fiction and waiting women in real life - While fictional women have waited in towers for their princes, real women have historically waited for marriage, for children, for soldiers in war, for husbands at work. On a more abstract level, women have also been waiting for a future of justice, equality, and safety.

But this was all old news.

At the time, I was also re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and, with the seed already planted in my head, some things started to become clear. One of those things was that The Handmaid’s Tale is essentially a story about waiting – Most of Offred’s time is spent in her bedroom, waiting for the Commander, for Nick, for pregnancy, for a revolution, for an escape, or for death.

It is also a story about resistance, a quiet kind, but resistance nonetheless. When she can, Offred resists the oppression of Gilead mainly through her relationships – with the other handmaids, with Nick and the Commander, but also with imaginary listeners from the future. It is the belief that her words will survive and that someone will be there to listen that compels Offred to tell her story. And, as we learn in the final chapter of the novel, her story does survive and continues to be told centuries later.

In order to forge relationships inside her imagination, Offred doesn’t need to be particularly active – and so the place of stillness that exists in waiting becomes ideal for Offred’s main form of resistance.

This sets The Handmaid’s Tale apart from other stories about waiting women. In the songs mentioned above, for example, resistance means breaking free from waiting. There is no room for a princess to be dynamic while she sits in the tower. But Atwood’s novel takes into account that, sometimes, breaking free from waiting is not an option. So, for Offred, all the resistance has to happen while she waits.

And this is how I came to the definitive topic of my dissertation: bearing in mind that Gilead is essentially an exaggeration of the world we already know, I wanted to look into how time operates within it, how women like Offred relate to it, and what lessons we can learn, regarding our own relationship with time and with waiting. With this, I was confident that I had found something relevant and timely to write about, but I had no idea, back then, just how relevant it would still become.

Towards the end of February 2020, I started to feel a constant pain in my face and ears. I booked an appointment for the beginning of March. But then the lockdown was instituted, no one was to leave the house, and all non-urgent appointments were canceled.

It was months until I managed to book another one, and it had to be at a private clinic because all the public facilities were overcrowded and overbooked. When the time finally came, the doctor, a male one, told me there was nothing wrong with me and prescribed me medication for anxiety. Then followed several months spent in the waiting rooms of very pricey clinics, being dismissed as dramatic by hordes of doctors as my pain got worse and worse. All while working from home, alone, and delving deep into research about the links between waiting and power dynamics.

With all of this, I started to realize that the reflections I was making regarding Offred’s relationship with time were the reflections we should be making in our own lives. The pandemic altered everyone’s way of interacting with time, but it also exposed the dichotomy between those who use time as a tool of oppression and those who are oppressed by it. Waiting, despite being a universal and inescapable human experience, is also one of the ways in which that dichotomy manifests itself: Offred waits for the Commander, patients wait for doctors, women wait for men.

Offred’s situation is an extreme one, and mine might be too specific to be entirely relatable, but the waiting (and all the challenges arising from it) might ring a bell for a lot of people. Even though our conditions might not be nearly as dire as Offred’s, I imagine that most of us have, to some extent, felt the frustration of being made to wait, of waiting pointlessly, or not knowing what we have to wait for, of being deprived of our time and thus having our freedom restricted, of feeling stuck in this stillness.

And if our experience is similar to Offred’s in the sense that we too have felt waiting to be an oppressive force, then maybe it’s also similar to Offred’s in a sense that we can find the means to resist that force, as she does.

So, if waiting is a tool of oppression, and if we can’t escape it, how do we use it in our favor? Can we turn it into a tool of resistance, seizing control over time and claiming power for ourselves?

In the long months I spent researching this topic, I started to come to terms with the fact that I would finish the dissertation with more questions than answers. Still, I found some interesting possibilities in my readings. One of them came from Pankhuri Agarwal’s essay “Waiting as domination, waiting as resistance”. During her research about the experiences of Indian female bonded laborers in spaces such as courts, precincts, and shelters, Agarwal realized that waiting (and often not knowing for what or for how long) was a defining aspect of those experiences. She also realized that, in waiting, those women were able to forge their own paths to resistance:

“…While waiting, some women built informal networks (…). All these relationships were built through the common shared experience of waiting in legal proceedings; they knew that they can be made to wait forever without any outcome. Therefore, women used waiting to bridge the gap between their ongoing social realities and their aspirations to survive the injustice of waiting.” (2020)

Much like Offred, the women described by Agarwal are unable to escape the waiting imposed on them by authority figures, but in the stillness of waiting, they find fertile soil for their resistance, which, also like Offred, is based on the relationships they build.

But the most inspiring possibility I found was in Pablo Neruda’s poem “A Callarse”. I read it for the first time at the beginning of lockdown, and after months of analyzing very serious academic texts, I came back to it and found a perfect summary of all I had been trying to convey:

“What I want shouldn’t be confused/ with final inactivity:/ life alone is what matters,/ I want nothing to do with death./ If we weren’t unanimous/ about keeping our lives so much in motion,/ if we could perhaps do nothing for once,/ perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,/ this never understanding ourselves/ and threatening ourselves with death,/ perhaps/ the earth is teaching us/ when everything seems to be dead/ and everything is alive.” (English translation by Stephen Mitchell)

How, then, do we turn waiting into a tool of resistance and use it to our advantage? How do we make the necessary changes in the way we interact with time, in order to move forward into this inevitable new world?

Well, I don’t know. Like I said, I have more questions than answers. But ending with a poem – this poem, specifically – is dreaming up a future, one that seems impossible but still must be dreamed. When Offred imagined her story being told in the future, it didn’t seem possible either.  Her waiting made it happen, which is not to say she did nothing – quite the opposite, actually.

Maybe we can learn how to do the same, maybe not. Maybe the answer is somewhere in the stillness of our waiting, in the knowledge that this is something we all share, and in the bonds we have yet to create through it. Maybe – and I choose my words carefully – we have to wait to find out.