As we turn the last page of Offred’s story in The Handmaid’s Tale, we encounter a surprising paratext that forces us to reframe and recalibrate our understanding of everything we have just read. The epilogue, entitled The Historical Notes, is presented as a partial transcript from a future academic conference held in 2195 at the fictional University of Denay, Nunavit. Reminiscent of the appendix “The Principles of Newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984, both epilogues frame the narrative within a broader historical context and offer a post-regime perspective. Atwood uses this device to highlight how stories, particularly women's stories, are transformed by time, power, and academic authority.
Atwood’s use of a scholarly frame in The Historical Notes invites us to ask who gets to write history, who is believed, and what is lost in the process of academic abstraction. Offred’s story, originally an oral narrative recorded on cassette tapes, has been filtered through multiple layers: spoken testimony turned into text, now dissected centuries later by scholars. Atwood plays with form to underline the irony: what was once a personal and painful testimony has become a scholarly puzzle.
The conference begins with an introduction by Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, whose presence hints at a shift in power and inclusion. As a woman, and Indigenous to North America, judging by her name, she symbolises a more diverse and cooperative academic world. It could be argued that the presence of Crescent Moon suggests potential change. She represents a disruption of the male academic monopoly, and maybe that this conference is chaired by an Indigenous woman suggests that future academia may at least strive to be more inclusive and equitable. Although, as we read on in Professor Pieixoto’s speech, this apparent equity will be thoroughly undermined and we will see that future-world sexism has hardly shifted. Additionally, the casual tone of the conference, complete with announcements about fishing trips, nature walks and sing-songs, creates a curious contrast. The horrors of Gilead are now discussed with amusement and distance. This detachment risks trivialising the real suffering of women like Offred. Atwood seems to warn us about the dangers of abstraction, of history being dissected in ways that strip it of emotional truth. Perhaps this is why the conference is set in Denay, Nunavit, a real Canadian territory, but also exploiting a pun on ‘Deny none of it!’; a chilling reminder that the atrocities described in Offred’s story are rooted in real-world history.
Professor Pieixoto, a male academic from Cambridge and the speaker of the evening, is then announced. His speech: “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale,” foregrounds the idea that Offred’s voice is suspect and needs to be ‘verified’. In his academic eyes, her narrative is a problem to be solved. His focus is not on Offred’s suffering, but on evidence, sources, and speculation.
Crescent Moon introduces Pieixoto as a respected voice in Gileadean studies and ‘co-editor…of the manuscript under consideration.’ She notes that he was ‘instrumental in its transcription, annotation, and publication.’ This tricolon of nouns is telling. Pieixoto’s annotation of Offred’s story becomes disturbingly analogous to anatomising it, both words rooted in acts of noting and cutting. This linguistic connection invites us to see Pieixoto’s academic handling of the text as a kind of intellectual dissection. The body of the text is treated much like the body of the woman who produced it: partitioned, reduced, and controlled. All the men in the novel, bar Nick, are engaged in acts of compartmentalisation in relation to women and their bodies. Throughout the novel, Atwood blurs the line between text and body, showing how both can be subjected to male scrutiny and dominance, using a recurring motif of dismemberment. Offred herself describes her narrative as ‘like a body caught in crossfire … this limping and mutilated story,’ reinforcing the idea that to tell her story is, in some sense, to expose her body to violation. Ultimately, Offred’s ‘her-story’ becomes ‘his-tory’: cut, categorised, and interpreted by men.
The Historical Notes will therefore draw attention to the contrast between male and female storytelling traditions. Offred’s narrative is emotional, fragmented, and uncertain, qualities linked with personal memory and female experience. In contrast, Pieixoto’s approach is linear, rational, and clinical, symbolising the masculine drive for control, categorisation, and order. His method of interpretation diminishes her voice, turning her suffering into a secondary concern, while questions of authenticity and authorship dominate the analysis.