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Offred's Mother In The Necessity Of Telling Her Story

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Offred’s mother is symbolic of everything that Offred is not. Although the reader only encounters Offred’s mother through her flashbacks, it can be seen that she stood up for women’s rights and took part in many rallies such as burning pornographic magazines. In some cases, Offred’s mother does not fulfil her role as a parent and can be seen as inappropriate; for example, she made Offred watch holocaust memorial documentaries from a young age and also brought her along to feminist protesting events. However, as the novel progresses, Offred’s resentment towards her mother lessens and her admiration grows. “‘I was so lonely, she’d say. You have no idea how lonely I was. And I had friends, I was a lucky one, but I was lonely anyway.’ I admired my mother in some …show more content…

When the tapes were found, there was no clear order and they had to be reassembled to create the text that is The Handmaid’s Tale. However, the reader was already aware of this as Offred had previously made her “listener” aware that it was a reconstruction. Donal Gaynor writes in his essay, The Necessity of Telling Her Story, “it matters to the readers understanding of the veracity of Offred’s tale that it has been reconstituted by Professor Pieixoto. Offred is telling a story of a women who the victim of misogyny in is its most brutal form and Professor Piexioto is a male.” Gaynor is pointing out that the moral questions that were raised by Offred are now problematic as the reader cannot fully trust Professor Pieixoto’s version of Offred’s tale and causes audience the question the reliability of the narrator. “As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voice may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which hey come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own

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