We’re still at the Birth Day Ceremony. It’s interesting how Offred describes the smells in the room. All very organic, “birthy” (my word). The word “matrix” used as a smell is interesting because we usually think of it as an abstract concept, like the mold from which something is formed. Yet, it can also be referred to as the complex organic material between cells out of which something is created, like hair or fingernails. So, the idea is that the room smells like birth, creation. The Handmaids are chanting, to keep up that group mentality, as if they are in a church—where chanting usually takes place. They will soon feel like they have become one. (Could the Handmaids also be the matrix out of which this one group is being created?) This is a brainwashing type activity, so that the Handmaids will keep that collective idea that they need to also have babies. Yet, they’re still treated as children as seen when they are given Kool-Aid made from powder, the kind we all drank back in the 1980s. However, someone spiked this...