Handmaid's Tale Fanfiction

What does Serena Joy (and women of the Christian patriarchy) regret?

In 2017 I was taking a fiction writing class in college, and our professor assigned us The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood to read. “Yeah, I didn’t really like it. I just don’t get it,” said one of my classmates, a former engineering major who had switched to creative writing. If you couldn’t tell, he was male. I gave him what my family has always called my death stare.

We were in class talking through the dystopian plot. The main character (who isn’t given a name in the book but is called Offred, as in “Of Fred,” to show she is treated as property) suffers a complete lack of bodily autonomy in an oppressive patriarchal theocracy called Gilead, where Old Testament laws and Puritanism combine to create a surveillance state that victimizes women.

What didn’t this twenty-year-old engineering-student-turned-writer get? I wanted to argue with him, but it didn’t seem worth my time.

Our assignment was to write a flash fanfiction piece about one of the characters from the book. I was drawn to Serena Joy, the wife of Fred, the main villain of the story. I was puzzling over her complicity in oppression and her motivations, in the same way I puzzled over the motivations of women in the Christian patriarchy movement.

Why did they enable abusers? How did they get there? Why did they stay?

These are complex questions that have more than one answer: Limited options. Abuse. Coercive control. So-called security through proximity to power.

But I also wanted to know: What did they wish was different? Who would they be if they could be anyone?