The collaboration of ‘Pandora’ in ‘The Handmaids Tale’

If any cultural presentation could get as close as possible to a representation of the Pandora myth as a kind of dream work of the collective masculine psyche using various defensive mechanisms to repress the very knowledge that women have struggled every day to secure, then it surely must go to The Handmaids Tale and its adaptation into a TV drama by Hulu now into its third season. A character has been developed from Season 1 into an important and controversial voice in Season 2 and Season 3 that deserves, no demands, to be looked at in more detail to see how the will to knowledge can be repressed by that very same will and become to those most affected by Pandora’s collaboration, a high priestess of anti-feminist villainy. She is Serena Joy.

SERENA JOY

Serena Joy is the wife of a Gilead Commander in whose household the Handmaid (Offred) of the story (by Margaret Atwood) has been sent to perform her function as a surrogate womb, in this newly formed theocracy and forced-birth hellscape. The characters in Season 2 are based upon the originals by Margaret Atwood but they have been further developed by new writers. What we get in Season 2 is the very latest thinking upon the issues raised in the original book and the latest reports from the feminist front-line.