The Handmaid's Tale

Back in her room, Offred considers how the night is “my own time, to do with as I will” and wonders, “Where should I go?” (47). She goes first to a memory of her best friend, Moira, sitting on her bed at college “in her purple overalls, one dangly earring, the gold fingernail she wore to be eccentric” (47).

From this memory, she goes to a memory of being a child in “a park somewhere, with my mother” (48). Ostensibly, they were there to feed the ducks, but in reality, they were attending a feminist protest where women burned pornographic magazines. Offred remembers how “big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air” (48).

Next, she remembers coming to after attempting to escape across the border to Canada and being told that her daughter had been taken away and rehomed with “people who are fit. You are unfit, but you want what is best for her” (49). They showed her a picture of her daughter holding a stranger’s hand.

Addressing the reader, Offred says that she “would like to believe that this is a story I’m telling” because “[i]f it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending” (49).