Cast your mind back to 2017. Following a decade of progress in the US, the first Trump administration had just begun, and the threats to women and Black and brown folks were, at the time, at an all-time high. Coming off the backs of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, resistance was still heady in the air, as was fear. So, the first season of Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale debuting that April was unnervingly well-timed. The series continues to get more savage as it goes on, turning off many who believe the show now borders on trauma porn. However, a strong contingent of viewers is determined to stick through to the very end as the final season premieres this April.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” opens with and focuses on Offred, aka June Osbourne (Elisabeth Moss), as she seemingly shakes herself out of dumbfounded complacency and into a determination to break free of the Christian nationalist country of Gilead. June is very clearly our window into Gilead, and it is through her eyes the audience sees this world. At first, she’s exactly who we think she is: a woman trying to survive and cause as little harm as possible as she does it. She’s motherly, dedicated, and resilient, always thinking of the greater good. But as the series plowed on for five seasons, our view of June changed drastically.
You can say that June’s transformation could be expected, given her circumstances. Gilead is a hard place, and she had to harden with it. We see her take charge within the resistance, sending messages for the elusive rebel network Mayday, and coming into her full power as a leader among the handmaids. In a place as vicious and brutal as Gilead, June endures unspeakable physical and mental abuse in her home while also dealing with the collective trauma of all of those forced to live the Gilead way. There are new rules and boundaries in this new world, and while it takes her some time, June adapts. As she tells her best friend Moira, you have to keep your shit together. There’s no time to fall apart, no time for fragility or to dwell on the reality of their circumstances. But as Gilead chips away at her hope and self-worth, it also chips away at her humanity and empathy.
It’s an ugly thing, being transformed by your circumstances. Looking back, we see the moment it happens in the season one finale. June, heading toward her fate after leading her first public act of defiance, says, “I have no choice. It cannot be helped. And so, I step up into the darkness within.”
Something that quickly happened after the first few seasons was the evolution of June from someone we lived through and rooted for to someone we watched warily, waiting to see if the angel or devil on her shoulders would win. I think June was always meant to be a likeable character, a little naïve and selfish, but altogether likeable in a world of deeply unlikeable people and bad actors. But fan sentiment has always been mixed on our main character, mostly warranted critiques of her white privilege (critiques that extend to the original work as well), but others were and are rooted in clear misogynistic disgust at the way she fights her oppressors. Even still, many viewers came down on her side. When the opposition is Gilead—a nation built on forcibly impregnating women and girls while violently keeping them in line with fire and brimstone—it’s hard to imagine that June could ever lose the support of the public. The ends were justifying the means—at least at first.
While the setup for June’s fall from grace began slowly, the journey was like a rollercoaster: slow and steady on the rise and then a swift, racing plummet. Everyone I’ve spoken to about “Handmaid’s” has a different moment where June lost them. For some early dissenters, their view of June faltered when she abandoned Emily (Alexis Bledel), forcing her to travel alone with June’s months-old baby through the snow and cold to the Canadian border. Others fell off later down the line when it was clear that June’s ego had begun taking the reins rather than her desire to protect and empower her fellow handmaids.
And ego, it turns out, is June’s fatal character flaw. The audience could see it first—her insistence that she and only she could bring about change and that everyone else’s efforts were insufficient. There are more moments than we can count, but a standout plot with fan support wobbling was when June used her power over the other women to terrorize and punish a fellow handmaid, OfMatthew. Seeing June sadistically wielding her egomaniacal rage against a fellow handmaid was jarring and disturbing, to say the least—actions that end up driving Ofmatthew to commit a desperate act of violence. The show tries to clean it up; the episode after the incident is a long, grueling lesson for June as she realizes the role she’s been playing. It leads her to supposed atonement, a beautifully hatched plot deemed Angels Flight that saw tens of children and Marthas rescued from Gilead through resistance networks. But in the end, the cracks in June’s character have shown, and it’s hard to take your eyes away from them.
By the time we reach the most recent seasons of “Handmaid’s,” even her co-conspirators are wary of June’s intentions. We see her not only committing wanton acts of violence but encouraging others to do so as well; we see her sadism rear its ugly head more times than I would like; and the cherry on top is June using her manipulative tendencies against the good guys rather than against those in power. Again, all of this is, to June, a realistic response to the environment she’s found herself in. What creates a contrast is when that behavior spills over into her life in Canada after she has successfully escaped Gilead. The,n we’re forced to reckon with who June really is, or, at the very least, who Gilead molded her into.
So, we find ourselves at odds with our once reliable, trustworthy narrator as she pushes ever further into the darkness of the moment—an uneasy place to be as a viewer in a country seemingly doing the same. In the end, the question of why June is the way she is isn’t important. But the question of if the public can handle unlikeable female characters certainly is.
Frequently on the internet and in the press, pleading calls for more dynamic, complicated, and even unlikeable female characters have been coming for decades. We’ve been seeing morally grey male characters for quite some time over several genres. It’s no longer unusual to have a protagonist, often a male love interest of some kind, who plays with the bounds of the audience’s morality. In “Handmaid’s” alone you have a stark example in Bradley Whitford’s portrayal of Joseph Lawrence, the architect of Gilead and an unlikely ally of June’s. Not only are we exceedingly aware of Lawrence’s leadership role in Gilead, but also of his unwillingness to abandon his vision in order to save lives. Fans, while still clear-eyed about who he is, were taken with Joseph, his banter with June, and his ever-present guilt. However, when June makes similar difficult decisions or refuses to deviate from her vision, we balk. Even her Gilead love interest, Nick Blaine, played by Max Minghella, is an active leader of the Gilead military, and the audience still yearns for him.
June stepped up into the darkness inside of her, a darkness everyone has but thankfully mostly haven’t activated. While the writing has been scattershot and the creative team has clearly tried to win folks back to June’s side in the penultimate season, it’s important to remember how we got here and the inherent nuance of the story. June had to abandon herself a long time ago to survive and make changes, and the writers have done a fine job at challenging their audience and asking: how much is a woman meant to endure before her outrage and ferocity are justified? Before she isn’t crucified for how she was able to survive? Gilead is a complicated place, and it births complicated stories and people.
I’m not sure if the writers set out to build a purposefully unlikeable female character who is there to challenge and enrage us, or if they intended her to be a wayward representation of a hero who lives long enough to become the villain. What I am sure of is that it’s now out of their hands and into ours.
As we embark on the sixth and final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” we’re nearly back where we started. Almost ten years later and the season is once again premiering on the heels of another Trump presidency, and the uneasiness in the country is palpable. Despite June’s complicated character, she still represents for many American women who we could be if our democracy crumbles. In the end, we’ve all stepped up into the darkness—our mission is to not become it.
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