Serena Joy

Who Is Serena Joy?

Serena Joy was a famous televangelist before Gilead, a woman who wielded influence, spoke to millions, and preached a vision of traditional values and female submission. Her previous identity as a public figure makes her current role as Wife even more grotesque. She was instrumental in creating the ideology of Gilead, in preaching the necessity of female subjugation, and in building the system that would ultimately ensnare her. Now, barren and powerless despite her position, she inhabits a house with a Handmaid brought in because Serena cannot provide what Gilead demands of her. She’s the living contradiction of her own philosophy: a woman who fought for the system that now destroys her. Her significance lies in how she exemplifies the ultimate betrayal, both of herself and of other women, for the sake of power that was always illusory.

Psychology and Personality

Serena Joy is a woman consumed by resentment masquerading as propriety. She moves through her days following the rituals and rules of Gilead with precision, yet her bitterness seeps through in small, vicious gestures. She’s intelligent, which makes her situation more tragic. She understands the cage she’s in even as she insisted on building it. She gathers tulips in her garden with an intensity that suggests she’s sublimating rage into horticulture, something alive that she can control in a world designed to control her.

There’s a performance quality to Serena’s presentation of self, a holdover from her televangelist days. She manages her facial expressions, curates her appearance, speaks with calculated softness. Yet beneath this performance lives a fury that occasionally cracks through. When she learns of Offred’s affair with Nick, when she realizes her infertility has made her expendable, when she understands that The Commander has moved on to hope from other sources, her mask slips. She becomes vicious in ways that reveal her true feeling: fury at being trapped, at having been played, at having destroyed other women only to be destroyed by the very system she created.

What makes Serena truly tragic is her capacity for tenderness that she’s forced to suppress. She wants to hold the baby she cannot produce. She wants love from The Commander that his resentment will never provide. She watches Offred with the child and contains the enormity of her loss. Her hardness is a defense against these desires that Gilead tells her she shouldn’t have.

Character Arc

Serena’s arc is a descent into desperation masked by increasingly fragile propriety. She begins as a figure of authority within the household, the Woman managing the rituals and the Handmaid. Her position seems secure, her ideology validated. But as the novel progresses and her infertility becomes undeniable, she begins to lose ground.

Her turning point comes when she becomes aware of the relationship between The Commander and Offred. She orchestrates the meeting between Offred and Nick, pushing Offred toward pregnancy regardless of who fathers the child. This is Serena’s moment of active rebellion against The Commander, a transgression that reveals her desperation and her willingness to subvert the rules she claims to believe in. It’s the act of a woman who realizes the system has no space for her except as a failure.

By the novel’s end, Serena is broken in ways that are both visible and invisible. The miscarriage or false pregnancy she experiences shatters her final hope for redemption within Gilead’s logic. She’s complicit in her own destruction, having helped build the machinery that now crushes her, and that knowledge is perhaps the cruelest punishment Atwood could devise.

Key Relationships

The Commander is her partner in ideology but her adversary in actuality. They built Gilead together, but he now uses his power to humiliate her, bringing a Handmaid into their home specifically because she cannot conceive. Their marriage is a cold war conducted through prayer and silence.

Offred becomes Serena’s obsession and focus of resentment. Serena watches Offred with ferocity, aware of her connection to The Commander, increasingly jealous of her youth and fertility. Yet she also pities Offred, almost protects her at times, seeing in Offred a version of the future that awaits any woman in Gilead who cannot produce.

Other Wives are her sister-soldiers in the regime, but there’s competition and isolation among them. They share an ideology but ultimately cannot trust each other because they’re all defined by their inadequacy in a system that permits only one path to validation: bearing children.

What to Talk About with Serena Joy

Voice conversations with Serena Joy on Novelium could explore:

Building Your Own Prison — How do you live with the knowledge that you actively created Gilead? That the system destroying you was your vision?

On The Commander — When did you stop loving him? Or did you ever? Is it worse to be betrayed by someone you never loved?

Motherhood and Loss — The child you cannot have haunts you. Can you reconcile your ideology about women’s purpose with your inability to fulfill that purpose?

Your Televangelist Past — Who were you before Gilead? What did you really believe, versus what you performed?

Offred and Jealousy — Do you want The Commander for yourself, or do you simply resent that he’s gotten something from her that he won’t give you?

On Female Solidarity — You’ve positioned yourself against women. Does watching Offred suffer feel like victory or like looking in a mirror?

Why Serena Joy Changes Readers

Serena Joy forces readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that women participate in systems that oppress women. She’s not a victim who’s excused by circumstance; she actively chose to build Gilead and actively worked to marginalize women within it. Yet Gilead also victimizes her. Both things are true simultaneously, and readers must sit with that discomfort.

She also complicates the notion of complicity and sympathy. Readers might find themselves pitying her even as they recognize her cruelty, understanding her rage even as they see it misdirected at other women rather than at the system. She’s a cautionary figure: this is where the path of buying into oppression leads, not to power but to a different form of vulnerability.

Famous Quotes

“A wife is not a concubine.”

“You have power over me. I have no power over you. So I do what I can.”

“There’s still a God, whether we like it or not.”

“Blessed be the fruit.”