Summary: Chapter 45
Offred feels great relief when she hears that Ofglen has
committed suicide, for now Ofglen will not give her name to the
Eyes while being tortured. For the first time, Offred feels completely
within the power of the authorities. She feels she will do anything
necessary to live—stop wanting control of her body, stop resisting,
stop seeing Nick. From the porch, Serena calls to Offred. When Offred
comes in, she holds out her winter cloak and the sequined outfit
Offred wore to the club. She asks Offred how she could be so vulgar,
and then tells Offred she is a slut like the other Handmaid and
will come to the same end. Nick stops whistling, but Offred does
not look at him. She manages to remain calm and composed as she
retreats to her room.
Summary: Chapter 46
After her confrontation with Serena, Offred waits in her
room. She feels peaceful. Night creeps in, and she wonders if she
could use her hidden match and start a fire. She might die from
smoke inhalation, although the fire would be subdued quickly. Or
she could hang herself in her room from the hooks in the closet,
she thinks. Or she could wait for Serena and kill her when she opens
the door to her room. Nothing seems to matter. In the twilight,
she hears the van coming for her, and she regrets not doing something
while she had the chance. As the van pulls into the driveway, she
sees the Eyes painted on its sides.
The van pulls in, and Nick opens the door of Offred’s
room. Offred thinks he has betrayed her, but he whispers that she
should go with the Eyes. He tells her they are in Mayday and have
come to save her. Offred knows that he might be an Eye, because
the Eyes probably know all about Mayday, but this is her last chance.
She walks down the stairs to meet the men waiting for her. Serena demands
to know Offred’s crime, and Offred realizes Serena was not the one
to call these men. The men say they cannot tell her. The Commander
demands to see a warrant, and the Eyes—or the men from Mayday, perhaps—say
that she is being arrested for “violation of state secrets.” As
Serena curses her, Offred follows the Eyes to the van waiting outside.
Summary: Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s
Tale
The epilogue is a transcript of a symposium held in 2195,
in a university in the Arctic. Gilead is long gone, and Offred’s
story has been published as a manuscript titled The Handmaid’s
Tale. Her story was found recorded on a set of cassette
tapes locked in an army foot locker in Bangor, Maine. The main part
of the epilogue is a speech by an expert on Gilead named Professor
Pieixoto. He talks about authenticating the cassette tapes. He says
tapes like these would be very difficult to fake. The first section
of each tape contains a few songs from the pre-Gileadean period,
probably to camouflage the actual purpose of the tapes. The same
voice speaks on all the tapes, and they are not numbered, nor are
they arranged in any particular order, so the professors who transcribed
the story had to guess at the intended chronology of the tapes.
Pieixoto warns his audience against judging Gilead too
harshly, because such judgments are culturally biased, and he points
out that the Gilead regime was under a good deal of pressure from
the falling birthrate and environmental degradation. He says the
birthrate declined for a variety of reasons, including birth control,
abortions, AIDS, syphilis, and deformities and miscarriages resulting
from nuclear plant disasters and toxic waste. The professor explains
how Gilead created a group of fertile women by criminalizing all
second marriages and nonmarital relationships, confiscating children
of those marriages and partnerships, and using the women as reproductive
vessels. Using the Bible as justification, they replaced what he
calls “serial polygamy” with “simultaneous polygamy.” He explains
that like all new systems, Gilead drew on the past in creating its
ideology. In particular, he mentions the racial tensions that plagued
pre-Gilead, which Gilead incorporated in its doctrine.
He discusses the identity of the narrator. They tried
to discover it using a variety of methods, but failed. Pieixoto
notes that historical details are scanty because so many records
were destroyed in purges and civil war. Some tapes, however, were
smuggled to Save the Women societies in England. He says the names
Offred used to describe her relatives were likely pseudonyms employed
to protect the identities of her loved ones. The Commander was likely
either Frederick Waterford or B. Frederick Judd. Both men were leaders
in the early years of Gilead, and both were probably instrumental
in building the society’s basic structure. Judd devised the Particicution, realizing
that it would release the pent-up anger of the Handmaids. Pieixoto
says that Particicutions became so popular that in Gilead’s “Middle
Period” they occurred four times a year. Judd also came up with
the notion that women should control other women. Pieixoto says
that no empire lacks this “control of the indigenous by members
of their own group.” Pieixoto explains that both Waterford and Judd
likely came into contact with a virus that caused sterility in men.
He says the evidence suggests that Waterford was the Commander of
Offred’s story; records show that in “one of the earliest purges”
Waterford was killed for owning pictures and books, and for indulging
“liberal tendencies.” Pieixoto remarks that many early Commanders
felt themselves above the rules, safe from any attack, and that
in the Middle Period Commanders behaved more cautiously.
