The entirety of Offred’s story is controlled by men even the thoughts that she records are discovered, edited, and titled by men.Īdditionally, Pieixoto’s attempt to identify Offred by identifying the Commander she lives with not only reveals the erasure of women within Gileadean society, but also the way in which the men of Gilead have been glorified throughout history. She has no autonomy or authority over her own story.

Thus, the entirety of Offred’s story is controlled by men even the thoughts that she records are discovered, edited, and titled by men. Pieixoto himself describes the process of naming the transcribed document, saying that “all puns were intentional, particularly that having to do with the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail that being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of Gileadean society.” The two male researchers take full advantage of their ability to title the manuscript and bestow on it a cheeky name that alludes to and, by making a pun, mocks Offred’s sexual servitude. Offred, the narrator of the novel, who has no identity other than the name of the man she works for, does not even get the final word in her own story.Įven the name “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as is revealed in the epilogue, was not chosen by Offred herself, but by the two male professors who discovered the tapes and transcribed them. While the actual body of the novel is narrated by a woman, the novel ends with an analysis of these events presented by a man. The epilogue takes the form of a historian’s address at a prestigious university’s conference, as Professor Pieixoto, one of two men responsible for transcribing the cassette tapes into the document known as The Handmaid’s Tale, discusses the difficulties he met in attempting to verify the happenings recorded in the tapes.

Set in the distant future, The Handmaid’s Tale’s epilogue reveals that the main body of the novel is, in fact, a collection of tapes - Offred’s oral history of her time serving the Commander. However, one of the most disturbing and often overlooked portions of the novel is the epilogue, which does not directly involve Offred, and is primarily narrated by a man. And, at a time when legislators have voted to defund Planned Parenthood and our country has seen the election of a man accused of sexually assaulting no less than seventeen women, the dystopian story about an America in which women are gradually stripped of their rights rings eerily true.

With the recent release of the Hulu original series The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1984 novel by the same name has once again entered the public consciousness. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

The handmaid's tale books in order