Contradictions in The Handmaid's Tale

In the first 24 chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale there are a number of sections that seem to contradict each other. It is not clear to me whether these are just oversights by the author that might be a result of her crafting an overly complicated world, or whether these were intentional and either say something about the narrator Offred, or exist to leave the reader in some confusion about Offred’s world.

One of the most obvious contradictions is the information we’ve been given about Moira. On page 124, while Janine is giving birth, the handmaid next to Offrred asks her, “‘Are you looking for anyone?’” to which Offred responds, “‘Moira.’” At first this seems to make sense because Moira was Offred’s and the reader is never told what happened to her, but a few pages later, new information makes this conversation very confusing. Pages 129 through 133 describe how Moira escaped the Center and on page 133 Offred tells the reader, “We expected her to be dragged in at any minute, as she had been before. We could not imagine what they might do to her this time. It would be very bad, whatever it was. But nothing happened. Moira didn’t reappear. She hasn’t yet.” If Moira escaped the Center and nobody has heard from her since it makes very little sense that Offred would expect to find her amongst the Handmaids. As we learned in Offred’s interaction with the doctor in Chapter 11, having sex with someone other than a Commander would be punishable by death for a handmaid, and handmaids who can’t have children are sent off to the colonies. This makes it seem very unlikely that if Moira were to have escaped the Center by dressing up as an Aunt they would have just let her return to being a handmaid. We also learned at the beginning of the book that gossip spreads amongst the women, especially through the Marthas. This makes it hard to believe that even if Moira was found and still became a handmaid, that Offred wouldn’t have heard about it.

This inconsistency in what we know about the fate of Moira could have a number of explanations. It could be a reflection of the desperation Offred feels to learn what happened to her friend, it could be that Offred knows more information than she has revealed or it could have been an oversight by the author, though this seems unlikely because these two moments happen close together in the book and are relatively significant. In the remainder of the book, some information might be given to clear this up, but details that don’t align in books are a major pet peeve for me and right now this inconsistency and others I’ve noticed in The Handmaid’s Tale, such as details we’ve been given about Offred’s mom, are lowering my overall opinion of the book considerably.

If the author does plan to address this particular inconsistency, it would have been my preference that she set this up in a different way. In mysteries, I personally like to be given enough information to at least make a guess at the solution, but in this case, at the very least I would have liked the author to make it clear that more information will be revealed about what happened to Moira. This way I would at least be wondering about that new information and not whether or not the author somehow made what seems to me to be a pretty obvious mistake.

Another contradiction that I’ve noticed is in the stories that Offred tells about her mother. The first of these stories is on page 38, where Offred describes a book burning that her mother took her to. Offred explains that a group of women and some men are burning magazines. One woman asks Offred’s mother if it is okay for Offred to burn a magazine which Offred describes as having a “pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from ceiling by a chain wound around her hands.” Offred’s mom agrees but tells the woman not to see the content of the magazine. This even seems to reveal two things about Offred’s mom: that she spends her time doing things like burning explicit magazines, which based on the setting of The Handmaid’s Tale in an ultra-religious society might lead the reader to believe that Offred’s mom is quite religious herself, and that she wants to protect her daughter from sexual material. Both of these ideas however are refuted later in the book.

In Chapter 20, Offred describes movies she and other women are shown in a reeducation camp, of events meant to shock the women into submission including women being tortured, raped and killed. One of these movies was different and showed Offred’s mom with a group of women carrying signs with messages such as “Freedom to Choose” and “Recapture our Bodies.” These signs indicate that this is some sort of feminist rally, which shows that she is very much against the patriarchal Christian movement that formed Gilead. Then, on page 145, Offred tells the reader,” The mistress – my mother explained mistress, she did not believe in mystification, I had a pop-up book of sexual organs by the time I was four.” This quote contradicts the idea that Offred’s mom wanted to protect her from sexual material. While it is possible to argue that Offred’s mom could have both been against pornographic material and relatively progressive in other areas of gender and sex, all of these moments taken together seem to give us an inconsistent picture of Offred’s mother. If she “doesn’t believe in mystification” and is okay with her daughter learning about sexual organs at the age of four, it doesn’t seem that she should be so worried about the destruction of sexual material, her daughter catching a glimpse of it.

These details about Offred’s mom, seem less significant than those about what happened to Moira. This means that I see no purpose for the author intentionally creating this inconsistency, which is particularly bothersome to me. While I don’t think that these inconsistencies make a huge difference in how I understand the story, they are something that I notice and have difficulty ignoring.