By Ian Cho, Class of 2026

Editors Notes: Essay for Dr. Barnes’s VF English assignment on the Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fictional diary of a woman named Offred who is subject to institutional rape and has the sole purpose of reproducing under a totalitarian government called Gilead, where women are entirely stripped of rights. The speculative novel contains an Epilogue called “The Historical Notes” that deliberately draws attention to how scholars facilitate discourse about societies throughout history by framing Gilead society from the perspective of scholars 200 years after the regime. “The Historical Notes” is written as a transcript of a lecture by Professor Pieixoto, a renowned professor of Gileadean Studies, during the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies. Atwood uses metafiction to critique the danger of the complete avoidance of presentism and the objective nature of historical scholarship, as it affects contemporary society’s perception of morality and undermines the suffering of individuals throughout history.

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