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Janine is one of the women that Offred lives with at the Rachel and Leah Center, where they receive their Handmaid training in the early days of Gilead. Offred dislikes Janine, who has a weak personality that makes her the target of bullying from the Aunts and Handmaids alike. While Offred and her peers would likely never have blamed a woman for being raped before the creation of Gilead, Janine is subjected to vicious verbal attacks and shaming after she admits she was sexually assaulted years earlier. Prompted by Aunt Lydia, the women participate in shaming Janine through a religious context, chanting that her impious dress and actions caused the rape to occur. However, while some of the women may indeed be truly radicalized by Gilead, Offred’s bullying of Janine is not rooted in religious bigotry but rather in her need to simply take out her rage and pain on another human being. To show these emotions in any other context would be dangerous, so she shows them in a way that is acceptable to Gilead’s regime. Of course, Janine’s treatment is unfair – she is a victim of the regime, and she is further victimized when she becomes a scapegoat who absorbs the misery of her female peers.
To avoid shaming, Janine quickly admits that her rape was her fault, prompting praise from Aunt Lydia. This reaction teaches Janine that she can survive the Rachel and Leah Center by becoming an exemplary student and capitulating to anyone who shows authority over her. However, she exhibits a few worrying behaviors, including dissociative episodes where she believes she’s still working as a waitress in the former world. Years later, Offred recognizes Janine as Ofwarren, and remains frustrated and annoyed by Janine’s continued simpering obedience to the regime. However, Janine’s pregnancy has heightened her status in the community and given hope to the other Handmaids. When the baby is born, Janine seems to have won herself a safe, permanent place in the hierarchy of Gilead. Her hopes are soon crushed when the baby dies weeks later, and Janine is reassigned to a new family, expected to begin another pregnancy despite the physical and emotional toll she has just endured. Toward the end of the novel, Offred interacts with Janine at the Salvaging, and finds her in another dissociative state. Janine’s mental imbalance will likely see her sent to the Colonies to perform labor with the other Unwomen until she dies.
Janine serves as a mirror to Offred and the other Handmaids. They hate her because she reflects what they’ve all had to become to survive in Gilead: meek, submissive, terrified, performative, and self-hating. There is little evidence to show us that Offred is significantly braver, more assertive, or more rebellious than Janine, which makes her disgust of Janine’s weakness baffling. Just as the reader may sometimes be frustrated with Offred’s passiveness and submission, so too is Offred frustrated with these same traits in Janine, unwilling to admit that she is no better.
