Birth Day Offred Analysis

Offred experiences a dream within a dream, and then she wakes up
Before having breakfast, she thoroughly describes her feelings towards an egg
A siren on a red Birthmobile reaches the house
Offred and three other women in the van are on the way to witness Janine’s birthgiving
On the way, Offred flashbacks to some of Aunt Lydia’s lessons
After the red Birthmobile reaches Janine’s Commander’s house and Offred exists the van, a blue Birthmobile, for the Wives, arrives.
Offred then assumes that the Wives have gathered at Janine’s Commander’s house to see Janine's belly and gossiped about how bad their Handmaids are.
Continuation of “Birth Day”
Commander is nowhere in sight, and the doctors are only called in for emergencies
Ofwarren (Janine) is in the master bedroom, with two women by her side
Aunt Elizabeth stands by to help while the rest of the women (everyone from the district) sit cross legged and crowd around them
Remembers the biblical saying according to her ability; to each according to his needs
The narrator has a flashback of the weekly movies they used to watch back in the Rachel and Leah centre
Remembered the movies Aunt Lydia showed them sadistic porn and movies about women being murdered.
Also showed them the un women documentary(which had no soundtrack) so that the handmaids would hear the screams or grunts.
The narrator sees her mother in the feminist rally
She has further flashbacks of her mother's decision to have a baby at 37, and the criticism she received for it (being called “Aged Primipara”)
Offred remembers when her mother would criticize her and Luke’s life
Despite the rocky relationship, Offred wishes for everything back to the way it was.
Through the use of tropology, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margret Atwood conveys not only a class conflict amongst different genders but also a class conflict within the same gender.
In these lines, Offred identifies the class conflict by mainly comparing the food served to the Wives to the food served to the Handmaids.
Offred enumerates the food served to the Wives as if staggered by what is being served but describes her meal blandly and abruptly. “Ham, cheese, oranges...” and fresh-baked breads,” which are served to the Wives, symbolizes the superior class, while the “milk and sandwiches, on a tray,” which is served to the Handmaids symbolizes the inferior class. Oranges, as said in the beginning of the story, symbolize luxury, and luxury, according to Oxford dictionary is “an inessential, desirable item that is expensive or difficult to obtain”. Thus, this further proves how lavish the Wives’ meal is compared to the Handmaids’ milk and sandwich; the sandwich’s components are not even mentioned, showing how poor the quality of the food
is.