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I lay in bed that night with the three photographs of the eligible men floating in the darkness before my eyes. I pictured each one of them on top of me—for that is where they would be—trying to shove his loathsome appendage into my stone-cold body. Why was I thinking of my body as stone cold? I wondered. Then I sa it would be stone cold because I would be dead.

Agnes recounts this nightmare vision in Part XIV, immediately after Aunt Gabbana presents her with three options for her future husband. In Gilead, a young woman is conventionally understood as old enough to marry shortly after she reaches puberty. For young women of noble birth, like Agnes, the transition to married life begins with her transfer to a new school where she learns the skills necessary for a Wife to manage her new household. The young woman also dons a new wardrobe with spring green accents that visually signal her “freshness” and readiness for marriage. With these changes in place, Aunts initiate a search for potential husbands. And when the Aunts have narrowed down possible matches based on the men’s’ interest and on genealogical research (to avoid accidental inbreeding), they present the options to the bride-to-be and her caregivers. The family has one week to make a decision, and though the final choice ostensibly belongs to the young woman, caregivers often force a choice that would selfishly benefit them.

The quotation above appears shortly after Agnes learns about the three potential husbands Aunt Gabbana has chosen for her. Agnes feels completely powerless following Aunt Gabbana’s visit, partly because she finds all the men chosen for her revolting, and partly because she assumes Commander Kyle and Paula will force her to marry Commander Judd, the most powerful of the suitors. This sense of powerlessness leads Agnes to have a nightmare vision in which each of the three possible husbands takes a turn mounting her for sex. Her sense of immobility suggests the threat of rape and hence profound trauma. To make matters more disturbing, Agnes reflects that in addition to being motionless, she imagined herself as dead. Agnes therefore equates the performance of her sexual duties as a Wife not just with sexual violence, but with her own spiritual or physical death. In other words, she envisions marriage as a nightmarish union with will sap her of all strength and will. Agnes’s decidedly dark vision of marriage reflects her growing sense that domestic life for women in Gilead is tantamount to death.

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