Popular Culture Review 32.1
she has crafted for a Mexican trade delegation (“ A Woman ’ s Place ” 28:00-28:03 ). The parallels to similar displays white Southern slaveholders would create for their Northern visitors are clear .
Like her contemporary and 19 th century peers , June endures physical harm as an enslaved person . Viewers see through flashback the savage beating she takes as she attempts to escape with Hannah , and the sensory assault when the red tag is applied to her left ear , marking her as a handmaid in service to Gilead . When June displeases Serena , the Commander ’ s wife often assaults her . After her failed escape attempt with Moira , June is returned to the Red Center and laid face down on a table while Aunt Elizabeth whips the soles of her feet . Audiences do not see directly the outcome of this beating ; instead , they imagine the results from the bloody bandages that cover her feet . Despites these attacks , June bears no lasting physical reminders of her beatings . Like Dolores , her white body remains unmarked . In contrast , Ofglen ( played by Tattiawna Jones )— a model handmaid throughout the season — questions one of Aunt Lydia ’ s directives in the final episode and a guardian breaks her jaw and knocks out several of her teeth , a permanent disfigurement . Her body , like Maeve ’ s and Douglass ’ s aunt ’ s , is one on which violence is both enacted and permanently seen .
After a period of repeated trauma that indoctrinates readers into the experience of enslaved persons , slave narratives often feature failed attempts at the exercise of agency ( often in the form of escape ) followed by despair and the eventual transformation into a heroic figure . In Douglass ’ s narrative , his fight with Covey leads to a desire to escape , which he initially tries with a group of men using forged passes written by his own hand . This plan fails and Douglass is jailed for some
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