Aunt Lydia: The aunt who taught women to hate themselves

In “Night”, the last episode of the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017), Aunt Lydia gathers the handmaids in a field and hands them stones. They are to stone to death the woman who endangered a child, and the woman turns out to be Janine, one of their own. Ofglen protests and a guard knocks her to the ground with his rifle. Then June steps forward, says “I’m sorry, Aunt Lydia”, the formula of submission they were taught at the start of their training, and drops her stone. The others follow, one by one. When the guards raise their weapons, Lydia stops them: the handmaids, she says, are her responsibility, and she will punish them herself. The series adapts Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, in which the United States has become Gilead, a theocracy where the few fertile women are assigned to the households of the Commanders to conceive children through a ritual rape called the Ceremony. First they pass through the Red Center, where they are trained by the Aunts. Lydia, played by Ann Dowd, who won an Emmy for the role, takes away their names, which become their Commander’s with the prefix “Of”, dresses them in red and teaches them to obey. She punishes with a cattle prod and does not stop at mutilation: Janine has an eye removed for disobedience. A jailer who tortures her prisoners and protects them from the guns of others is the figure Erving Goffman helps to read with his studies of total institutions and stigma.

// The theoryThe mark and the institution

Erving Goffman devoted two fundamental books to the mechanisms this theory studies. In Asylums (1961) he described total institutions, places where large numbers of people live isolated and subject to a single authority, such as prisons, asylums or convents. On entry, the inmate undergoes a mortification of the self: their name, clothes, belongings and history are taken away, and they are subjected to rituals of humiliation that erase their former identity. In Stigma (1963) he analyzed how a social mark turns a person into someone “discredited”, and how the stigmatized end up internalizing the gaze that despises them.

// The subjectThe jailer who loves her prisoners

What makes Aunt Lydia frightening is that she is not a sadist, or not only. She truly believes in Gilead. She thinks the old world was decadent and dangerous for women, and that the regime protects them. That is why she can torture the handmaids and, at the same time, weep for them, pray for them and defend them before the Commanders. Ann Dowd plays her as a mixture of strict teacher, fanatical nun and possessive mother. The series complicates her over the years, and The Testaments makes her more ambiguous still: someone who collaborated with the regime to survive and is waiting for her moment to bring it down.

In the novel she speaks through Offred’s memory, and her lessons are always the same trick: to present confinement as protection. In chapter 5, while Offred walks to the shops in her red dress and her white wings, she remembers Lydia explaining that there is more than one kind of freedom, freedom to and freedom from:

Goffman would recognize the move. Total institutions do not present themselves as prisons but as refuges, and they ask the inmate to be grateful for what they take away. Lydia does not hide the loss of freedom: she renames it. In the series, the scene with the stones adds the other half. After the refusal, the first episode of the second season shows her taking the handmaids to a mock hanging, nooses round their necks, before letting them live. Protection and punishment come from the same hand, and that is how a total institution makes its inmates dependent on it.

// The crackStigma explains the method, not the woman

Goffman explains how the Red Center works, but his theory deals with institutions and those who suffer them, not those who run them. To understand Aunt Lydia another question is needed: why a woman becomes the administrator of other women’s oppression. That question belongs more to feminist criminology and to studies of collaboration with authoritarian regimes.

Moreover, the twist of The Testaments changes the reading of everything before. If Lydia acted from the start with a double purpose, her cruelty is no longer just conviction but also strategy. Atwood raises a hard question the theory does not resolve: how far complicity with a regime can be justified in order to destroy it from within.