The Handmaid's Tale: Chapters 31–Historical Notes

I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock.

And the owners of them, sullen faced, unrepentant, pushed by the Eyes against the walls of their bedrooms, while the sorrowful voice of the announcer tells us voice-over about their perfidy and ungratefulness.

Surprising how much like a small, begging child she makes me feel, simply by her scowl, her stolidity; how importunate and whiny.

It’s difficult for me to believe I have power over him, of any sort, but I do; although it’s of an equivocal kind.

Sometimes he becomes querulous, at other times philosophical; or he wishes to explain things, justify himself.

Not a dandelion in sight here, the lawns are picked clean. I long for one, just one, rubbishy and insolently random and hard to get rid of and perennially yellow as the sun. Cheerful and plebeian, shining for all alike.

And when we are kneeling, heads bowed slightly, I can hear from all around us a susurration, like the rustling of insects in tall dry grass: a cloud of whispers.

Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep.

I guess they’ve had to fall back on a mélange, whatever they could scrounge or salvage.

Surely there must be something here for us, other than this futility and bathos.

I’ve heard this speech, or one like it, often enough before: the same platitudes, the same slogans, the same phrases: the torch of the future, the cradle of the race, the task before us.

She smiles down upon us, generous, munificent. She is about to give us something.

Professor Pieixoto scarcely needs any introduction, as he is well known to all of us, if not personally then through his extensive publications. These include “Sumptuary Laws Through the Ages: An Analysis of Documents” and the well-known study “Iran and Gilead: Two Late-Twentieth-Century Monotheocracies, as Seen Through Diaries.”

The regime created an instant pool of such women by the simple tactic of declaring all second marriages and nonmarital liaisons adulterous, arresting the female partners, and, on the grounds that they were morally unfit, confiscating the children they already had, who were adopted by childless couples of the upper echelons who were eager for progeny by any means.

The regime created an instant pool of such women by the simple tactic of declaring all second marriages and nonmarital liaisons adulterous, arresting the female partners, and, on the grounds that they were morally unfit, confiscating the children they already had, who were adopted by childless couples of the upper echelons who were eager for progeny by any means.