Roland 15
is perhaps why Offred imagines Nick taking off her dress in her first version of how events
unfolded in Nick’s room,
He's undoing my dress, a man made of darkness, I can't see his face, and I can 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 (338).
Unlike the sex with the Commander, she refers to what is happening in this room as “love.”
However, the love can only happen after he first takes off the dress that represents her position as
a handmaid. Atwood shows that this love is impossible by having Offred follow this description
with, “I made that up. It didn’t happen that way” (338). The reality of the situation is that love is
impossible; the red of Offred’s position prevents it. “Neither of us says the word love, not once”
(347). In reality, Offred knows that, “there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged
wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” (176).
The function of being a “sacred vessel” is also significant in discussion of red because of
the many connections between the color and childbirth. A red Birthmobile collects all of the red-
clad handmaids to take them to the home of a woman in labor. The birth scene with Janine
further establishes this connection to red, “The smell is of our own flesh, an organic smell, sweat
and a tinge of iron, from the blood on the sheet, and another smell, more animal, that’s coming, it
must be, from Janine” (Atwood 158). This animalistic smell of blood and childbirth shows the
biological connection because the senses are filled with a heavy sense of red; Offred can smell
and see the blood in the room, but she can also sense it on an instinctual level. The red blood fills
the women with a sense of anticipation, on a very animalistic level, for the child that they know
will be coming. When the baby does arrive, “it slithers out, slick with fluid and blood” followed
by the red after birth (162). In addition to being covered in blood, the baby’s head is described as