The Art and Politics of Rewriting.

Margaret Atwood’s Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Among the many frameworks of interpretation that Margaret Atwood’s dystopia (or ustopia, as she calls it) The Handmaid’s Tale allows, a particularly challenging one is its reading in/as palimpsest. Choosing not to favour an attempt at hierarchizing the narrative construction and the fabula contained in Offred’s spoken tale – transcribed from audiocassettes two centuries after the deployment of the Christian fundamentalist coup d’état that turned the United States into a horrifying inferno for women –, and also leaving on the sidelines the seductive, yet rather facile feminist evaluation that the novel invites,
this paper focuses on metafiction and the rewriting of “herstory”, in an analysis of the ‘Historical Notes’ that conclude the novel, going backwards rather than forwards in tracing its art and politics.