Feminist Historiographical Metafiction

1
The Handmaids Tale (3)

• Feminist Historiographical Metafiction

2
General Questions

• What do you think about the important moments of
  this part Jezebels, Salvaging and the endings?
• Do you find Offred a feminist?
• How is history used? What are the purposes of
  using official history?
• How is the filmic adaptation different from the
  novel?

3
Feminist Issues Review and Additions

• Control and Complicity
• Offreds public performances her accusing Janine
  at the Red Center her liking to have sexual
  power (power of a dog bone)
• her personal involvement with the Commander (who
  is daddyish to her) e.g. chap 29
• (new) Chap 33at Prayerganza her response to
  Janines baby (notewallpaper)
• Chaps 42 43 Salvaging and Particicution her
  changing responses
• Chap 45 --her sense of exemption and her
  submission to power (// when finding that none of
  the dead bodies is Lukes)

4
Feminist Issues Review and Additions

• 2. Rebellion
• Offreds connection with Ofglen chap 27 (? p.
  217? 220)
• Her prayer p. 251
• Her getting a match chap 32 p. 271? 274
• Moira at Jezebel

5
Metafictional Elements Review

• Different meanings of story-telling and
  reconstruction
• The episode with the Commander
• The episode with Nick chap 40
• Telling the story of Moira to keep her alive
  p.317

6
Historiographical Metafiction

• Historiographic metafiction is one kind of
  postmodern novel which rejects projecting present
  beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts
  the specificity and particularity of the
  individual past event.
• It also suggests a distinction between events
  and facts that is one shared by many
  historians. Since the documents become signs of
  events, which the historian transmutes into
  facts, as in historiographic metafiction, the
  lesson here is that the past once existed, but
  that our historical knowledge of it is
  semiotically transmitted.

7
Historiographical Metafiction (2)

• Finally, Historiographic metafiction often points
  to the fact by using the paratextual conventions
  of historiography to both inscribe and undermine
  the authority and objectivity of historical
  sources and explanations. (122-123, Linda
  Hutcheon)

8
The Historical Notes

• 12th Symposeum of Gilead Studies in 2195.
• University of "Denay("deny native group in
  The Northwest Territories) Canada criticized.
• Explains the source of the tale (30 something
  tapes), their inability to identify Offred, the
  Gileads ways of arresting women and possible
  reasons for infertility.
• Similarities between Pre-Gilead period and Gilead
  period birth services polygamy, totalitarianism
  (e.g. KGB) p. 386- 87 (see more here)

9
The Historical Notes

• Gender structure unchanged
• Professor Pieixoto flirting with Crescent Moon
  enjoy her
• Underground Femaleroad The Underground
  Frailroad 381
• His distrust of the narrator.
• Our job is not to censure, but to understand.
  383

10
Differences between the film and the novel

• Film
• Memoryescape scene, quiet
• The woman as still an object of gaze. e.g. after
  the 1st ceremony.

• Novel
• More thinking, remembering, narrating and
  feeling.
• e.g. after the 1st ceremony

11
Differences between the film and the novel (2)

• Film
• The ending killed the commander, rescued by Nick
  

• Novel
• After the ceremony self-nourishing want to see,
  want to steal. pp. 125
• With Nick different possibilities in chap 40.
• ambiguous ending

Neither of us say the word love. . . (347)
And so I step up, into the darkness within, or
else light. (378)