Historical Notes - Analysis

[The following is based on "Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid's Tale" by Arnold E Davidson.]

 the main story of Offred’s experiences in Gilead is set in a ‘future’ time, in a state where women are valued only for their fertility.  Appended are the "Historical Notes", which offer a second future, one another 200 years further into the future  At an historical symposium, anthropologists discuss Offred's narrative  The "Historical Notes" offers a note of hope – Gilead did not last

The Notes validate the text – but this is also ominous:

 a male (of course) lecturer analyses the text; his commentary is ostensibly more authoritative than the participant woman's eyewitness account  the 'objectivity' of the analysis is set in counterpoint to a regime which really objectified women - and blacks, Jews, Quakers, Baptists etc

 Atwood uses the standard format of dystopia: hopeless despair  hope/underground  cracks in façade (Commander's lapses); personal hope through love affair  possibility of escape  Offred's end is uncertain but the very existence of the tapes suggests she did escape  the order of the 30 tapes was decided by the scholars; by implication, there could be another order of events. Organising the text = "creating" a fiction  the relentlessness of history makes The Handmaid's Tale plausible

 female narrator seen as fully domesticated – passive and in need of rescue by a man  this gender cliché is posited – with remarkably little evidence – by Prof Pieixoto: the "quasi military" Mayday; the nurturing Femaleroad: men = aggressively opposed; women merely reacting compassionately  this distinction is underscored by another sexist joke: the "Frailroad", which echoes the joke of the title – a pun on tale/tail  the jokes give the game away: the inbuilt sexism and distortion of women in Gilead is echoed in the inbuilt sexism of the C22, where smug self-congratulation passes as scholarly objectivity

 Offred's story is surely a crucial text – Gilead regularly destroyed its own data  scantiness of evidence underscores how much history is the product of the historians.  yet Pieixoto dismisses the 'usefulness' of this; only politics are of value  Pieixoto trivialises the importance of Offred's tale because he trivialises women's role in society  he concerns himself not with the document but with the identity of 'Fred' – disregarding what he has for what he wishes he had (a printout from Fred's computer)

Plenty of other parodies in the historical note:

 "Krishna and Kali Elements. . . " – historians read what they want into the past.  Chair: Maryann Crescent Moon, University of Danay (deny but also Dene, the Western native Arctic group), Nunavit (none of it, but also Nunavut = "Our Land" to the Inuit)  the far north has become the seat of power in N America  Pieixoto begins with sexist and racist joke: Arctic Char/Chair – the Chairwoman assumes her marginal place as mere handmaiden to his central text  Pieixoto's discourse mirrors the structure of the novel – and the tale serves as handmaiden to the career-advancing epilogue of the academics  Is this what history is: something for future historians to build careers upon?  Notes provide comic relief, yet in many ways are the most pessimistic part of the book. Pieixoto claims the right to "authenticate" her story and thus confirms that the underlying attitudes of Gilead are alive and well – a male will decide the meaning of female experience.