“I’m sorry my story is in fragments”: Offred’s Operatic Counter-Memory

Abstract

Paradoxically, an opera that consists of fragmented lines throughout would, at some point, cease to be fragmented, just as completely atonal music ceases, at some point, to be dissonant. Because Ruders's music for The Handmaid's Tale is a mélange of short leitmotifs, historical musical quotations, and melodic and amelodic lines, it depicts the "dual and triple consciousness" of counter-memory more forcefully than would a singularly expressionist opera. [...]the orchestra (which the characters also do not hear) traditionally speaks the hearts of the characters; it expresses their "true" feelings, or unconscious impulses. In the opera, every time that phrase is sung, it is sung to the same vocal line (172, 384-85, 541).11 Therefore, when it crops up for the third time in the quartet at the end of the opera, which involves the Commander, Serena Joy, Rita, and Offered, it stands out even against the poly/cacophonic barrage of sound. Because the phrase signals resistance-"our" Offered's resistance; the violent, self-destructive resistance of the former Offered, who hanged herself; the resistance that will be the "new" Offered's, when "our" Offered is replaced-its aural resilience further emphasizes the resistance inherent in the act of narrating counter-memories. The result is a truly hybrid narrative that uses counter-memory, in Lipsitz's words, to "understand both the linear history of contract histories and the oral traditions of aggrieved populations" (229), and the effect on the audience is one of absolute bombardment. Because we watch and hear parallel situations from the past and the present happening at the same time, we do not merely understand Offered's complex fragmented psychological state, we feel it ourselves.