The Handmaid’s Tale: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Offred dreams first that she has seen and picked up her daughter, and then that her mother has come to take care of her. When she truly wakes up, she wonders if she’s been drugged. She sits on the Faith cushion and slowly eats breakfast, noting that her eggcup looks like a skirt, and taking pleasure in the beautiful egg.

A red van, a Birthmobile, comes to the house to pick up Offred. A Guardian drives her and several other Handmaids to Ofwarren’s (Janine’s) house for her birth. One of the other handmaids cries with joy. The Handmaids are allowed more freedom than usual in their behavior on birth days.

Offred knows that the chance of a healthy, living, normal-bodied baby is just one in four, because of many different problems that lead to sterility: radiation and pollution, atomic power plant mishaps, pesticides, syphilis, birth control pills, and women having their tubes tied. Offred remembers Aunt Lydia scorning the women who sterilized themselves and calling them Jezebels.

Offred goes deeper into her flashback from the Rachel and Leah Center. She remembers Aunt Lydia explaining that some women self-sterilized because they thought the world was ending. Offred’s school desk had love messages carved into it, but none after the mid-eighties, when schools were closing because there weren’t enough children. As Aunt Lydia talks about the Handmaids’ importance, Offred wants to kill her.

Back in the present day, the Birthmobile arrives at Ofwarren’s house, and we learn that Ofwarren is Janine, whom Offred disdains and thinks of as a “whiny bitch.” Women must give birth without painkillers or medical intervention because that’s what’s in the bible.

Offred imagines how the Wives talk about the Handmaids. One might say that a Handmaid is like a daughter to her, but the others talk about the Handmaids as pesky animals or objects who are not to be trusted.