the washroom at Jezebel's; remembering better times with her mother, husband, and daughter, even the veiled sniping between Luke and his mother in law; recollecting the pleasant frivolities and diversions that women once enjoyed - for example, eye makeup, fashions, and jewelry, and women's magazines; and allowing herself moderate hope for some alleviation of present misery, although Offred never gives way to fantasy of rescue, reunion with her family, and return to her old life. Oral history, the second determinant, is a frequent vehicle of oppressed people who, by nature of their disenfranchisement through loss of personal freedoms, turn to the personal narrative as a means of preserving meaningful experience, and to recitation of eyewitness accounts of historical events in an effort to clarify gaps, myths, errors, and misconceptions. Similar to Jane, the participant in the Louisiana civil rights movement and title character in Ernest Gaines' fictional Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and to Jack Crabb, the bi-national spokesman and picaresque participant at the Battle of Little Big Horn in Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Offred offers an inside view of the effects of political change on ordinary citizens - that is, powerless, who are most likely to suffer from a swift, decisively murderous revolution. As a desperate refugee on the "Underground Frailroad," her harrowing flight contrasts the knowing titters of the International Historical Association studying Gilead from the safety of women's rights and academic freedom two centuries in the future. Speculative fiction, the third determinant, is a form of jeremiad - an intentionally unsettling blend of surmise and warning based on current political, social, economic, and religious trends. As a modern day Cassandra, Offred seems emotionally and spiritually compelled to tell her story, if only to relieve the ennui of her once nun-like existence and to touch base with real...
