Chapter Six
In Chapter Six the narrative pivots from the external surveillance of streets and markets to a confrontation with the built‑in memorial of violence: the Wall. The text juxtaposes the “church”—a museumized relic of pre‑Gilead faith—with the Wall, a conspicuous architectural palimpsest that records the regime’s punitive spectacle. By describing the church’s untouched gravestones and the unchanged brickwork of the Wall, Atwood foregrounds the temporal layering of power; the older structures remain physically intact, yet they are re‑signified through Gileadean ritual.
The passage deploys visual imagery (“white fluffy clouds…headless sheep”) to evoke a fleeting sense of freedom that is constantly interrupted by the “wings” and “blinkers” of the Handmaids—metaphoric restraints that limit the field of vision. This sensory narrowing mirrors the internalized self‑surveillance cultivated throughout earlier chapters. The narrator’s fragmented “gasps” of perception—“a quick move of the head…up and down, to the side and back”—illustrate a phenomenological disjunction: the body records the world in splinters, refusing the regime’s demand for a continuous, obedient gaze.
The description of the hanging bodies operates as a “materialized memory” that collapses past and present. The white bags over the heads are rendered as “snowmen…melting,” an uncanny metaphor that destabilizes the regime’s attempt to render the executed as dehumanized objects. The red smile of blood, linked in the narrator’s mind to the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden, creates a synesthetic bridge between personal memory (the garden’s tentative rebirth) and state violence, emphasizing the dissonance between private affect and public atrocity.
Moreover, the chapter foregrounds the performative aspect of Ofglen’s piety (“head bowed, as if praying”) as a strategic façade, echoing the earlier motif of outward compliance masking covert dissent. The narrator’s analytical voice—“I need to make distinctions… I note, tight around the handle of my basket”—reveals an embodied act of self‑monitoring that O’Brien terms “the internal audit of surveillance.” This self‑policing is reinforced by Aunt Lydia’s dictum that “ordinary… will become ordinary,” which the narrator internalizes as an anticipatory normalization of terror.
Finally, the enumeration of the men’s past professions (“angel makers,” doctors) and the procedural description of their execution (“placard… drawing of a human foetus”) function as a textual catalog of the regime’s retroactive criminalization. By naming the former roles, Atwood destabilizes the present legal rhetoric, exposing the regime’s reliance on a mutable moral lexicon to legitimize its punitive apparatus. The chapter thus consolidates the spatial, sensory, and epistemic mechanisms of control introduced in earlier chapters, while introducing the Wall as an architectural node where memory, authority, and resistance intersect.