SOURCE: “Science Fiction in the Feminine: The Handmaid's Tale,” in Margaret Atwood, St. Martin's Press, 1996, pp. 126-47.

In the following essay, Howells discusses the presentation of female self-identity, memory, sensual experience, and Offred's resistance to patriarchal authority in The Handmaid's Tale.

My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.

The Handmaid's Tale

These words spoken by Atwood's Handmaid, deprived of her own name and citizenship and known simply by the patronymic ‘Offred', might be taken as emblematic of a woman's survival narrative told within the confines of a patriarchal system represented by the distopia known as Gilead. Restricted to private domestic spaces and relegated to the margins of a political structure which denies her existence as an individual, nevertheless Offred asserts her right to tell her story. By doing so, she reclaims her own private spaces of...