The Explicator

ISSN: 0014-4940 (Print) 1939-926X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale

Charlotte Templin

To cite this article: Charlotte Templin (1991) Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale, The Explicator,
49:4, 255-256, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.1991.11484093

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1991.11484093

Published online: 22 Oct 2015.

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 Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Reviewers of Atwood's futuristic dystopia The Handmaid's Tale offered vari-

ous conjectures about the date of the novel's setting, ranging from Cathy N.
Davidson's estimate that the story takes place "sometime in the future, perhaps
the nineties, perhaps the turn of the century" (24) to P. Cousins's assertion that it
is set "in the U.S. nearly a century from now" (1384). In between fall various
other suggestions, including the following: John Updike's "best estimate" of
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"just before the year 2()()()" (118); Alan Cheuse's "only a few generations from
now" (4D); and, more accurately, Grace Ingoldby's "in the twenty-first century"
(31). Recent articles by Anne K. Kaler, David Ketterer, and Lucy Freibert place
the setting in the late twentieth century, evidently following the dating of the
twenty-second-century academics quoted in the "Historical Notes" appended to
Offred's narrative.
A careful reading of Offred's narrative itself gives us enough facts to date the
setting to within approximately a decade-in the twenty-first century, however,
not the twentieth. We know from Offred's account that she is 33 years old and
that her mother gave birth to her at age 37. In chapter 20, Offred sees her mother
in an old documentary of the "Take Back the Night Marches," which began in
late 1978. 1 Marches were held in many cities in the following years and were still
common when Atwood began work on the novel, probably in 1983. 2 Offred de-
scribes her mother in the film as young, "younger than I remember her, as young
as she must have been once before I was born" and also comments that "her face
is very young" (153). If Offred's mother was 25, say, in 1980, Offred would have
been born in 1992 and would be describing, in the present of the novel, events
that took place in 2025. We are talking here about approximate dates, but if we
assume that Offred's mother was somewhere in her twenties at the time of the
marches, we must put the present of the tale in the first decades of the twenty-first
century.
There is one other sequence in the plot that gives some hints toward dating the
setting. In chapter 24, Offred remembers seeing, at age "seven or eight," a docu-
mentary about World War II "made years before (188). This film included an in-
terview, said to have taken place "forty or fifty years later" (188), with a mistress
of a man who had run one of the death camps. Thus the film would most likely
have been made in 1985 or 1995. We cannot say positively when Offred would
have seen this film because her dating of it as "made years before" she saw it is
vague. At best, we can conclude that Offred saw it some years after 1985 (or after
1995). Offred's dates in this sequence are estimates (a realistic touch, given that
she is talking about childhood memories), but they enable us to make conjectures
about the time of the narrative that are consistent with my calculations above and
which preclude the possibility of a late-twentieth-century setting.

255
 We also know that the events in Offred's narrative take place about five years
after the beginning of Gileadean society, which must thus be strictly a twenty-
first-century phenomenon. Atwood subjects the scholars of the epilogue to mock-
ery on a number of counts. It may be that they are very poor historians indeed.

-CHARLOTTE TEMPLIN, University of Indianapolis

NOTES
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1. Laura Lederer describes the first Take Back the Night Marches in the introduction to Take Back
the Night: Women on Pornography.
2. See Freibert, note 3, 290.

WORKS CITED

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

Cheuse, Alan. "Margaret Atwood Stumbles on Science Fiction." Rev. of The Handmaid's Tale, by
Margaret Atwood. USA Today 7 Feb. 1986: 4D.
Cousins, P. Rev. of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Choice May 1986: 1384.
Davidson, Cathy. "A Feminist '1984': Margaret Atwood Talks About Her Exciting New Novel."
MS. Feb. 1986: 24-26.
Freibert, Lucy M. "Control and Creativity: The Politics of Risk in Margaret Atwood's The Hand-
maid's Tale." Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McComb. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1988.
Ingoldby, Grace. "Lives of Quiet Despair." Rev. of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.
New Statesman 23 Mar. 1986: 31.
Kaler, Anne K. " 'A sister, dipped in blood': Satiric Inversion of the Women Religious in Margaret
Atwood's Novel The Handmaid's Tale." Christianity and Literature Winter 1989: 43-62.
Ketterer, David. "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Contextual Dystopia." Science Fic-
tion Studies July 1989: 209-17.
Lederer, Laura. Introduction. Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. Ed. Laura Lederer.
New York: William Morrow, 1980.
Updike, John. "Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard." Rev. of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret
Atwood and The Good Apprentice, by Iris Murdoch. New Yorker 12 May 1986: 118-23.

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