This was written by Erica Dymond.
"A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit"
The pearl theme is one that is constantly brought up in the story, but is also very central to the plot as well. The character, Offred, will often when she thinks of her past, or makes a comparison, will think of pearls, such as one memory when she saw a Holocaust documentry, she noticed the mistress of a Nazi was wearing pearls. Another mention of this is Offred's lust for Nick, only the pearl/oyster is used in a negative light, to show just how repulsive it is. In another chapter, the pearl underlines how things truly are in Gilead. In the ultarian Gilead, it is said that Handmaidens are unfit to adorn themselves with such finery like pearls, believing that they are not good enough. The last example used in this text is when Offred compares herself to sand (believed to help create the pearl) and that her daughter is therefore a pearl. The author says this theme binds together these points
"The pearl/oyster theme ingeniously binds the novel's central points. Serena Joy is not a Commander's wife; she is the complacent mistress of a Nazi. Offred is not an imprisoned woman; she is an object of possession, denied even the most fundamental pleasure of love. Gilead is not a fine-tuned machine journeying toward Utopia; it is an inferior military-state swarming with contradiction. Finally, Offred's abducted child is not living a more privileged and moral life but is being brainwashed into becoming a fine, baby-producing "Gileadean." All this from a pearl." (ERICA JOAN DYMOND, Lehigh University)
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