Lit Log #1 - Valeria Escobar

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator described a scene when the Commander was reading to a group of women and all eyes were on him. “To be a man, watched by women.”, she said on page 87, as she went on questioning what was going on through his mind as he was being observed so closely by women. As a woman in the real world, this is an image that’s strange and a little uncomfortable to try and visualize. When I thought about this quote, the first image that popped up in my head was a painting done by Waldemar von Kazak called “Daily Portrait of a Woman”. It shows a group of pigs looking at a woman sitting in the subway. When I first saw this artwork, I felt a bit uncomfortable and the absence of the woman’s face made me feel like I was the one being watched. I wanted to portray this in my drawing.

While it’s the complete opposite situation, I still thought about feelings of awkwardness, fear, and uncomfortability. Offred also thought about similar feelings when trying to decipher what the Commander might’ve been feeling in that situation. “To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style and shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.” (page 87). She compared him to a garment, an object, which is never really a comparison one makes to a man. She’s putting him in her shoes. However, there’s still a very clear power dynamic between the Commander and the women that makes it hard to really understand what is going on through the Commander’s head. The Commander holds all the power over everyone else in the household. He’s looked up to, so it’s hard to think of him as feeling scared of being watched because that would mean that the women hold power over him, and that’s not the case in Gilead. In the real world, women are often observed by men in a way that belittles women and creates many negative emotions, which makes Waldemar von Kazak’s painting feel so familiar.

I have a clear understanding of what being watched by men feels like. I know the sort of feelings it creates, but what does it mean when it’s a man that’s being watched? I couldn’t draw a face for him because I don’t know what he’s truly feeling, but I wanted to see if the women I drew created a different feeling than the feeling I got from seeing the pigs in Waldemar von Kazak’s painting. I also chose to only use the color red because red is a harsh and intimidating color. Gilead is plain and colorless, and still, the Handmaids wear this color that sticks out and catches attention. Trying to visualize what the Commander could actually see, the color red and the faces of the women were the two things that were clear in my head so these were the things I chose to show in my drawing.