Synopsis of Historical Notes This section is supposedly a transcript of one lecture from a conference, held in the year 2195, of historians interested in the former Republic of Gilead, which, it is implied, ceased to exist at some time in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. The conference is being held in Canada, and the speaker is a Professor Pieixoto from the University of Cambridge, England, talking on ‘Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale'. He describes how he and a colleague, Professor Wade, have been working on transcripts of a group of about thirty old cassette tapes found in a metal box in what had once, before Gilead, been the State of Maine. Professor Wade has given the title The Handmaid's Tale to these tapes. The voice on all the cassettes is the same, but they have no way of knowing the correct order in which they should be organized, nor even if they are authentic. Pieixoto points out that, in Gilead at the time the material deals with, the tapes could not have been recorded, since a Handmaid would have had no access to such facilities, so presumably they were not made at the time the speaker is talking about (even though most of the material is in the present tense). Professors Pieixoto and Wade have tried to establish the identity of the Handmaid, but with no success. They realize that she must have been one of the first women forced by the régime to try to bear children because of the fertility problems in Gilead - the result of AIDS, syphilis, nuclear-plant accidents and toxic leakages. However, they do not know her name, and suspect that other names she mentions may be pseudonyms to protect identities. They have tried instead to identify the Commander in the story, and have come up with two suggestions: a Frederick Waterford and a Frederick Judd. Waterford was responsible for the design of uniforms, and details of names and ceremonial details for activities such as Salvagings, whilst Judd was involved in the massacre of Congress at the time the new régime took over, and for the forced emigration of Jews. Judd was also responsible for promoting the idea of particicution, and for forming the group known as the Aunts, whereas Waterford thought of giving them the reassuring names of well-known commercial products. However, neither of these men was married to a woman called Serena Joy, but they think this name may have been invented by the Handmaid. They think the evidence is most in favor of the Commander being Waterford, who was executed for being in possession of literary material and for ‘harboring a subversive', which could have been Offred. Pieixoto admits that they have no idea what happened to the Handmaid, and whether Nick really assisted her. He may have done so, Pieixoto suggests, because Nick himself would have been in danger after indulging in illicit sexual activity and could not risk Offred talking under torture.
