This article containers spoiler alerts for after Episode 8, Season 6.
As UK audiences approach the season finale of The Handmaid’s Tale, there continues to be questions around the significance of various symbols. There are the ‘Eyes’ that are always watching and show Gilead’s unwavering state of surveillance, flowers – tulips in particular – that symbolise fertility (Serena Joy’s garden is full of them), mirrors, or the lack thereof, which represent the regime’s need to limit self-reflection.
But it’s the red dress that is one of the strongest symbols throughout The Handmaid’s Tale. Worn by the handmaids it marks their fertility, the vibrancy of blood, but also symbolises the perceived sin in what they’re doing, sleeping with the Commanders who are married men. It also represents violence; both the potential brutality that they’ll be subject to if they fail to obey and the blood of those who have already been punished, whose tortured bodies are displayed on The Wall, a reminder to all. It’s the red robes that highlight a duality and a friction that is central to the handmaids’ oppression and adds to the series’ sustained, unsettling mood.
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The red dress also strips away their identity, making them look the same and covering their bodies. As June says in the final trailer: ‘Wear the red dress. Wear the wings. Shut your mouth. Be a good girl.’ And while other colours are worn by different characters, including blue to represent the purity of the wives and green for the Marthas to symbolise health and domesticity, it’s the red of the handmaids that becomes the most potent colour emblem in the final series.
While previously the red dress signified the handmaids' tyranny, June flips its meaning in the final episodes to symbolise resilience, strength and most explicitly, rage. In Episode 8, during the wedding of Serena Joy and Commander Wharton, the red dresses of the handmaids become powerful symbols of resistance as June leads an uprising that takes Gilead by storm.
She makes a speech that directly addresses the power and meaning of their attire, alluding to a time before Gilead, when they had their own wardrobes:
‘They wanted us to look like we’d been dipped in blood. Some fairytale figure in a red cloak. It seems ridiculous now to contemplate how important clothes were to us before. We had closets full of them. We took jobs we hated so we could buy more of them. So we could be fashionable. So we could be on trend.’
June goes on to say how she’s reclaiming the red dress: no longer will their clothes conceal bodies but they will use them to fight and conceal their weapons.
‘So they assigned us colors. They dictated what we wore. Who we could be. They used our clothes to divide us. To dehumanize us. But tonight, those clothes will be our weapons. Tonight, we will use these clothes to start a war. They put us in red, the color of blood, to mark us. They forgot that it's also the color of rage,’ she says.
It’s a powerful message and shows just how many layers, and twists and turns, there are when it comes to the symbols in The Handmaid’s Tale. We are utterly gripped.
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