Offred, the narrator protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985), has been variously analyzed by critics. For instance, Roberta Rubenstein
describes her as the symbol of “multiple inversions and violations of ‘nature and nurture’” (Rubenstein, 1988, p. 103), Arnold E Davidson calls her the keeper of the ‘secret account’ of Gilead with “its use and abuse of women” (Davidson, 1988, p. 113) and Neuman posits her as “a fictional product of 1970s feminism, [who] finds herself in a situation that is a fictional realization of the backlash against women’s rights that gathered force during the early 1980s” (Neuman, 2006, p. 858). Others like Finigan compare Offred to Spivak’s ‘subaltern’ (Finigan, 2011, p. 452), thereby problematizing the efficacy of her narrative. Chadha defines Offred as “a metaphor for all the vulnerable and powerless people of the world” (Chadha, 2009, p. 30), and Weiss claims that because of her “complacency, complicity and selfish concern[s]”, Offred “certainly does not represent Atwood’s ideal in how to respond to totalitarianism” (Weiss, 2009, p. 140). While the multitude of critical voices have often sympathized with Offred’s subjugation under Gilead’s dictatorial rule, criticized her for her apparent passivity and complicity, or viewed her as a symbol of the marginalized, an analysis of her agency as a chronicler of the pre- and post-Gileadean times in The Handmaid’s Tale appears relatively scarce and seeks attention. Accordingly, the present paper examines Offred as a historian and a chronicler, specifically a hysteric chronicler, of Atwood’s fictionalized fascist American state—Gilead. It argues that in The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred survives inhuman repression through her narrative and in turn leaves behind a tale that becomes the only historical document available to academic symposiums exploring Gileadean times two hundred years later in 2195. |
