Offred's Secret Prayer

Although Offred doesn’t strike me as a particularly fervent believer in whatever permutation of Christianity the state religion is in the Republic of Gilead, when she prays before the ritual rape scene she seems to acknowledge the concept of prayer as legitimate, and in her prayer a significant part of why she survives is reinforced: her hidden individuality. She prays, “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” and although she adds that she doesn’t know what it means literally, it has a functional meaning to her. The woman who occupied her room previously had inscribed it in the wood of her cupboard. It was an act of defiance of the previous occupant, and in reading the inscription it became an act of defiance for Offred too.

I don’t know yet if she ever finds out what it means, but with the aid of that most eminently valuable college resource, Wikipedia, I found it is a fake-Latin phrase meaning, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” How appropriate that even though Offred doesn’t know this (being cruelly deprived of Wikipedia as she is), the phrase attains the exact same significance in her mind as it has in a literal sense. She uses it to assert some degree of agency in a place where she cannot be controlled by the Commander’s regime: her internal monologue. It’s an assertion of resilience against the criminal actions of the theocracy of Gilead. It symbolizes for her that another woman was silently strong behind an assenting façade, a paradigm that she can emulate and thus retain some semblance of self. Without a creed like this, it is easy to conceive that the impossible situation in which she finds herself could destroy her utterly, could grind her down to nothing. With it, she can secretly be more than a walking uterus. She can keep thinking for herself, survive behind a final protective mental wall, and maybe she can escape her social prison.