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Warning: This post contains spoilers about "The Handmaid's Tale", Season 2.
"She's just a teenager," Sydney Sweeney impressed me when we spoke to phone.
Sweeney was talking about Eden, the 15-year-old Gileadean wife she's been playing in this season of "The Handmaid's Tale". The 20-year-old actress was not prepared for the strongly negative reactions that Eden, a rural teenager who is "given" to Nick some 30 years as a woman, sparked by fans of the series . She was expecting people to blame her for separating Nick and June, one of the central couples in the series, but she was taken aback by the extreme suspicion that she was in trouble. Eden has aroused among viewers. Fans have assumed that she was the spy of Serena Joy, that she was really supposed to be with the brutal and abusive commander Fred Waterford. My colleague and I were wondering if she would be the fall of Nick
" Never underestimate a zealous teenager I wrote
" Nick's new wife will definitely be in difficulty ", said a title Vanity Fair.
As of the penultimate episode of the season, we know that Eden was not a problem at all. was, as Sweeney said, just a teenager – though a teenage girl raised with little access to peers or to education in an oppressively theocratic society.A teenager who was married to a 30-year-old man without a choice: a teenager who learned that her only duty in life was to build a home and to have children and who rarely felt empathy or loneliness.
So why were we so many to challenge her? Maybe because she was
Of course, the public was ready to question Eden's intentions from the start. Not only was she an obstacle to a popular romantic subplot, but she was also presented as one of Gilead's true believers. Eden asked if Nick was a "genre traitor" when he would not sleep with her. She gaped at the maids when they whispered their real names in the supermarket. She found the smuggling letters destined for the Mayday resistance group. At each turn, she could have upset the lives of other people living in the Waterford House. And yet … she did not do it.
Instead, she wondered what it might be like to have "love and a baby". to do just that. She suddenly ran away with a young guardian named Isaac – the person who gave her her first kiss – with the only hope of making "a real family".
And for this "sin", Eden and her young lover paid the ultimate price.
She and Isaac were sentenced to death for the crime of adultery. They were taken to a gym filled with spectators, their families and the entire Waterford family; they were escorted to the top of a very high dive platform; and they were pushed with weights attached to their hands and ankles. It's an end almost no fan seen coming and one that will set in motion the main arches of the season finale. The death of a character that few have understood – or even bothered to notice – will have a ripple effect that could bleed into the already-planned third season of the show
Bruce Miller , the showrunner of The Handmaid's Tale. when we spoke before the release of the first episode of season 2 . He explained that drowning was an update of dunking, a method of execution historically reserved for women suspected of being witches.
Sweeney says that she found herself screaming at Eden (crying) while reading the scripts for her last scenes. In the end, she found empathy for her character – a 15-year-old who wants to find God and love and makes choices based on these guiding principles. In the last moments of Eden, the camera is in the face of Sweeney. The eyes of Eden are full of fear and confusion, horror and resolution.
"There were definitely a lot of thoughts behind Eden's eyes during all those times," said Sweeney. "Is she doing the right thing? God will save him? Is love enough? But she chose love."
It would be easy to believe that Eden is a pious idiot to give up her future in order to remain faithful to her values and desires. But as I watched as Eden made her heart-rending exit, all I could think was how much I had underestimated her – how the confused reactions of the fans and even the characters that surrounded her in the show reflected the how we see teenage girls in real life.
Both in Gilead and in our world, adolescent girls are alternately dismissed and feared. They are silly fangirls crazy lovers, narcissistic takers of selfies too young to be really listened to. And yet, despite the fact that adolescent girls are constantly belittled and condescended, they are still considered a threat. Their knees and shoulders can destroy entire school days for their male peers. They can take behemoth marks with their inconsistent preferences. They can tempt older men in to fall in love with and by attacking them . And if someone deigns to explore her sexuality, she is labeled, as the commander says, a "slut," a woman "carried away by her own selfish lust."
In Gilead and in our world, teenage girls are alternately fired and feared.
"I gave him the opportunity to raise." To be a wife, a mother, to associate on behalf of Waterford, "the commander is unleashed in front of the execution from Eden, worrying that his actions will mean for him and for his power. Up to this point she was below his opinion. She barely mattered until her quest for love and a baby – exactly what she thought Gilead was asking her for – conflicted with her control polish.
In Gilead, teenagers are terrifying precisely because they might question the motivations of powerful men and act in a way that goes against the story that Gilead tries so hard to push. The autocratic regime claims to only care for children, then turns around and murders two of them in a pool.
It is hard to believe that the Commander's attempts to punish Eden for submitting to Gilead's name will prove fruitful. So much is conveyed in the silent reactions of the different characters to the pool scene. It's one thing to watch adults being tortured, but another thing to watch a child. Since there is now a little girl in the house, Serena, Nick, June and Rita – all of whom have an investment in the future of the child – will have to decide how they will protect her from harm. A company that offers so little and takes When I asked Sweeney how the death of her character could affect others, she paused and replied forcefully:
"They will no longer be never the same. "
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