A Sad Party

In our last reading, the ¨underground club¨ like scene stood out to me more than anything else has so far. It was action packed, and arguably the most significant part of the book.

The craziness of this scene started off before the party with Offred and the commander alone. The commander ¨gifted¨ what sounded like a lingerie costume type of piece to Offred. Of course, as if getting this piece wasn’t already a big enough shock with it´s illegality in Gilead, Offred noted that this piece also appeared to be used.

Once Offred and the Commander were ready, Nick would chauffeur them past ¨checkpoints¨ to the location of the party, and Offred would need to duck down along the way. Offred noted that Nick seemed familiar with the route to take and the time to return. Her suspicion of this being a routine event for the Commander, with other women who potentially even wore her same outfit, was clear.

Once at the hotel lobby, Offred and the commander walked into a fancy party, cautious of not drawing attention. For Offred, this should have been an all time highlight! The first taste of fun since she lived outside of Guilead! But it wasn’t ; her already uncomfortable night was somehow worsened.

Offred described sitting down on a couch for the first part of the party. Around her, similarly dressed party goers in costumes lingered. But who were they? At first this seemed unclear to Offred. But soon later, the commander would go up to a group of men to, as Offred described, both show off to the men by pointing her out and show off to her by showing his many friends.

With this, the people at the party became more clear: they seemed to be women, and other powerful figures of Guilead. It seemed like Offred immediately understood what this meant. She had been living in this awful society for so long, valued solely for her reproductive use and literally named after the commander (Of-fred). Yet with all of this, the people of power in Gilead were hypocrites?! Blatantly breaking many of Guilead´s rules together in a party setting?! As I read this, I couldn’t imagine many things that would have been more demeaning to Offred. As if things weren’t already bad enough. Because of the obvious significance, choosing this to create an art piece was a no brainer. For my piece, I used a platform called ¨Dall-e¨ to make an AI generated image. In generating the image, I described ¨a hotel lobby party with fancy women and commanders lingering, with a couch at the front where a woman and man sit¨. I was pleased with how the image included everything, but what I like most is the blurriness. In Offred’s description of the scene, it seemed crazy, secretive and mysterious. The level of the blurriness did a perfect job of portraying all the knowns (Offred gave us) of the scene like the fancy outfits, couch and lobby - yet making it unclear: open to interpretation.