Science Fiction in the Feminine: The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

These words spoken by Atwood’s Handmaid, deprived of her own name and citizenship and known simply by the patronymic ‘Offred’, might be taken as emblematic of a woman’s survival narrative told within the confines of a patriarchal system represented by the distopia known as Gilead. Restricted to private domestic spaces and relegated to the margins of a political structure which denies her existence as an individual, nevertheless Offred asserts her right to tell her story. By doing so, she reclaims her own private spaces of memory and desire and manages to rehabilitate the traditionally ‘feminine’ space assigned to women in Gilead. Atwood’s narrative focuses on possibilities for constructing a form of discourse in which to accommodate women’s representations of their own gendered identity while still acknowledging ‘the power of the (male ‘universal’) space in which they cannot avoid, to some extent, operating’.² Like Bodily Harm, this is another eye-witness account by another ‘ignorant, peripherally involved woman’, this time interpolated within the grand patriarchal narratives of the Bible and of history, just as Offred’s Tale is enclosed within an elaborate structure of prefatory materials and concluding Historical Notes. However, her treasonable act of speaking out in a society where women are forbidden to read or write or to speak freely effects a significant shift from ‘history’ to ‘herstory’.

My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.

The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 60¹