SOURCE: “Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid's Tale,” in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, edited by Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro, Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, pp. 113-21.

In the following essay, Davidson examines the significance of the “Historical Notes” epilogue in The Handmaid's Tale, stating, “what Atwood has written is not just a history of patriarchy but a metahistory, an analysis of how patriarchal imperatives are encoded within the various intellectual methods we bring to bear on history.”

Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale conjoins two different projected futures. The first, distinctly dystopian, is Gilead, a fundamentally tyrannical order the author envisions for the Northeastern United States. The handmaid Offred's secret account (the women of Gilead are not even to have thoughts of their own, much less stories) gives us the measure of Gilead and particularly emphasizes—as even Offred's name attests—its use and abuse...