Mundane Motherhood

The sentence "Maybe it's just something to keep the Wives busy, to give them a sense of purpose," in chapter three of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, says quite a bit about people's views of the role of and importance of women (23). It implies women are only good for or good at activities such as knitting scarves. Certainly the fact that the reader has only been shown the Commander's Wife smoking or knitting does not make a good case for the importance of women not only in the household, but also in society. The speaker's suggestion that the Wife did not even put the scarfs to use, "but [instead] unravelled and turned [them] back into balls of yarn, to be knitted again in their turn" further insinuates the uselessness of women.

The concept of "keep[ing] the Wives busy" reminds me of my mother and her friends the school year we lived in Hong Kong (23). She joined a women's group as, for the first time since my sister was born, she was not working. They did, as my mom was told, "anything to waste time while their husbands were at work." Similarly, while on holiday in Ireland this break, we started talking to a lovely woman with two children, a toddler Brian and a baby Robin, who told us she usually meet her friends who have toddlers down at the beach where we were "for a milk run" every afternoon "just to give us mothers something to do to waste time." A "milk run" or a women's group dumpling making class are just the same as spending the day knitting scarves that may not even be used or, as the speaker says on page 22, needed: they are ways for women to waste time, which hardly seems like an action for a position of importance.

During a conversation with my mother and my aunt yesterday, my mom described the mundane life of a stay at home mother. Both my aunts on my dad's side stay at home with their three and four children. My mother discussed how she could never stay home as her sister in laws do, because she never felt like she was accomplishing anything. Working as a teacher, at the end of every school day, she says she can see the progress her students are making. The same cannot be said of motherhood on a daily scale. She told me she was tired of picking up the same toys four times in one day. However, Serena Joy does not show the same frustration with the mundane life of knitting the same scarves. Though knitting, the speaker explains, provide the Wives "a sense of purpose" my mother felt dumpling making classes and clearing toys did not give her enough of a purpose (23). 

"[S]mall goals that can be easily attained" are not fulfilling (23); they do not make a woman feel important in what they do even though the speaker feels great pride her in "small achievement, to make oranges happened" (35). I am interested to see if Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, feels an absense in her life due to the mundaneness, similar to what my mother felt, or is content with knitting scarves - the life of my aunts.