Essay
AP English, The Handmaids Tale Essay
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An essay written by a 2019 matriculant of SAHETI School on the topic of The Handmaids Tale Historical Notes
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AP English Essay: The Handmaids TaleMargaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a thought provoking novel
presenting a dystopia where freedom of women is restricted because of the
new Christian governments regime. This is represented by a new society,
Gilead, that is described by a young woman named Offred. However, when
we reach the end of the novel and we read the Historical notes it is seen that
the story was actually told years later by a man that had found Offred’s story
recorded on cassettes. The Historical Notes are every important and through
them we start to actually view Atwood’s lesson.
In The Handmaid’s Tale Offred’s story makes the reader aware that this is
what the world could have become or can become in the future, as Margaret
Atwood herself has stated that “there isn’t anything in the book not based on
something that has already happened in history or another country.” The end
of the book shows us the problems of a single story as we learn that the
keynote speaker in the Historical Notes is an “expert” on Gilead named
Professor Pieixoto, a man that tells his audience to not judge Gilead too
harshly.
This makes the reader feel that the whole story was actually narrated by a
male perspective rather than Offred’s, because even though the story is told
by her it is actually seen by the male eyes, this is seen when Pieixoto says
that the tapes found were not numbered nor arranged in any particular order
so the professors who transcribed the story had to guess the chronology of
the tapes, so they are creating the whole order thus showing us the male
perspective.
The whole epilogue or rather the Historical notes come as a surprise and is a
bit offensive to the reader that has just experienced Gilead and Offred’s
torments alongside Offred. This is a shock to the reader as we read her life
being discussed in front of an audience and later on get joked about.
The above brings me to my next point, through his harsh comments Pieixoto
dehumanises the Handmaids, as they are made to be seen as sexual objects
there to satisfy men’s needs and as tools to procreate. We can also see that
there was little to no effort to find out Offred’s name that shows the readers
that the academics did not care about her but rather her story. This
marginalises the torture and horrors that the women went through. Pieixoto
also fails to mention that this should never occur again, which makes the
reader see that not even academics want to acknowledge what happened
during Gilead’s rule, they discuss Offred as a pawn in a reproductive game
belittling her and her story and overprizing a few printed pages from the
Commanders computer over her story of suffering. The fact that these
professors also chose to name the story The Handmaid’s Tale again shows
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