The scratched writing on my cupboard wall floats before me, left by anunknown woman, with the face of Moira. I saw her go out, to the ambulance,on a stretcher, carried by two Angels.
This mixing of her ideas, her preservation of Moira in the physical artifacts she sees is what keeps her sane for the rest of the book despite her efforts not to bring her past into everything.
I'd begun to thinkshe existed only in my head, but here she is, a little older. I have a good view,I can see the deepening furrows to either side of her nose, the engraved frown
Just as she has seen Moira, changed. -- Her child, changed. Now she sees Aunt Lydia, older now, it begins to take her out of living in her past and more so in the present. She begins to break down now because her worldview is so skewed.
I'd like to tell a story about how Moiraescaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn't tell that, I'd like to say she blewup Jezebel's, with fifty Commanders inside it. I'd like her to end withsomething daring and spectacular,
It is also Offred's inability to see Moira and the subjects of her past as any more than still images of nostalgia. In this way she resigns from her future, longs for her past, allows herself to be complacent in what happens so long as she can remind herself and keep the night to herself.
There is also ironic recreation of the past, active structuring and processing. She is active, ironically, in the night. She is complacent in Gilead during the day. Which says something very odd and wrong about how one can only live in a sinful world -- too perfect and everything becomes stale... she is alive in the past.
eally done it to her then, taken away something — what? — that used to beso central to her? And how can I expect her to go on, with my idea of hercourage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not
Moira's idea in Offred's past has disappeared, just like the shattering of Offred's daughter and her image, when Offred sees her picture. She is overly reliant on an idealised picture of her past to coping with the present, which is ironic because this is what they wanted. Except humans are always looking outside for the solution when it critiques something innate, a lack of completion or satisfaction.