THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 2008
Week XIV
Helen Todd as Aunt Lydia in a theatrical production of The Handmaid's TaleThis week's blog entry should focus on how the "Historical Notes" section of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale retroactively reframes our reading of Offred's narative. How do the historian's remarks make us question the authenticity of the story as well as Offred's accuracy about the regime? How does his desire for "for even twenty pages or so of print-out from Waterford's private computer" give us a new perspective of Offred's version of events in Gilead? Does she over-emphasize the personal over the political? Why does Atwood make us reconsider the entire narrative with these "historical notes" in relationship to what Offred decides to discuss? How do you think Atwood might be responding to Virginia Woolf's call for a literary emphasis on the private, emotional, and domestic sphere instead of the epic, political, military narratives during the early part of the twentieth century? Lastly, how do all of these elements speak to the feminist maxim "the personal is political"?
It seems as if the entire purpose of the “Historical Notes” is to inform the reader on truth and perspective.
Initially, this theme of objective vs. subjective truths was brought about by the modernistic writers of the early 1900s, who, through the “stream of consciousness” styling’s, meant to portray that when authors wrote in a third-person omniscient narrator-like perspective, it overemphasized an unrealistic version of life, one where a character’s actions are played out before him and his thoughts are written on the page just like any other simple story. However, the modernist authors wrote their works in the style of how thoughts enter and exit the mind, thus portraying a more objective look at the protagonist’s lives, coming from their thoughts, instead of an all-knowing narrator.
Atwood writes The Handmaid’s Tale is this very same style, focusing more on the protagonist’s thoughts and perspective and how they flux as the world around her effects her. And yet, in finishing the novel with the “Historical Notes”, Atwood completely jars the reader and seems as if to say that truth is subjective no matter what perspective is taken. For within the “Historical Notes”, we the reader slowly become more and more suspicious of the reality of Offred’s narration. And it is portrayed that this speaker, this historian orating on Offred’s story, is not the least bit taken on Offred’s point-of-view within the story, pointing out many observations as to why Offred’s version may be irrational or too saturated in the totalitarian belief of the society she is living in. And this also seems to be the reason he wishes he had some information from the Commander’s computer as well, so he could therefore compare and contrast the two for a more accurate truth of the situation.
It seems that in the end, Atwood leaves us with a choice, which ironically enough parallels that so popular feminist saying: which to believe, the personal or the political?
