The Handmaids Tale

• In The Handmaid’s Tale (end of ch. 15), when Moira tries to escape the Red Centre, she is brought back with beaten hands and feet and ‘lay on her bed, as an example’.
• There is something monstrous in the description of her feet, which demonstrate and warn against transgression from virtuous behaviour: they are, the theocratic rulers of Gilead would say, a visible warning of the results of vice and folly.
• "Her feet did not look like feet at all. They looked like drowned feet, swollen and boneless, except for the colour. They looked like lungs."
• The description of the person subjected to the particicution may be another example of this.