Erin Spampinato
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Thank you for this! I totally agree with your reading and am happy it’s out there. The people need to know about the epilogue! I want to add another (complimentary) perspective on it.

The epilogue suggests a world that believes itself “post-gender” (in the same way that some said we were “post-racial” when Obama was elected). The professor is speaking, if I remember correctly, in honor of a woman (isn’t the conference convened as the anniversary of a woman’s book or something like that?). The characters’ surnames suggest that whatever was America is now what we would think of as an uber-liberal society in which women have full rights and indigenous and formerly enslaved peoples’ rights to the land are respected (perhaps only via tribute — thus literally in name only — but we can’t tell that from the text of the epilogue).

That said, the idea of academic disciplines has survived in this new society (even if the disciplines have morphed somewhat). What I think is most damning about the epilogue is the cultural relativity moment, which you reference: “Pieixoto remarks ‘we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadean.’” As an academic, I was gobsmacked by this moment not because he’s treated Offred with casual misogny; I don’t actually think that’s what’s happening here, or at least not on a conscious level for any of the characters. I was shocked by the way this moment critiques academia and the intellectualization — and thus distancing — that academics perform when they look at their own and other cultures. Atwood seems to me a moral absolutist, who is harshly critiquing academic culture for its failure to find fault with the past (something academics are NOT supposed to do anymore).

For me this critique of academia is part of Atwood’s larger critique of liberal culture. Atwood is clear about the fact that one of the factors that caused Gilead to occur was the combination of radical (what we would call 2nd wave) feminists AND radical anti-rights folks. She’s thinking of second wavers like Catherine Mackinnon and the other anti-porn ‘warriors’. So I think the ending is really hard on liberalism (as hard as most of the book is on conservatism), or perhaps what we would now call the nascent neo-liberalism of Reagan-era America. I may be taking the critique of academia especially hard because that’s my field, but it seems to me that what’s most being skewered here are our intellectual structures of power (and of course, as you demonstrate, the misogyny that undergirds those and probably all structures of power).

Thank you for this insightful and thought-provoking piece!

    Erin Spampinato

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    Lady writer. Currently writing about depictions of sexual violence in literature and culture (from George Eliot to SVU). @spampinato_erin and erinspampinato.com