The Testaments

Title: The Testaments
Author: Margaret Atwood
Genre: dystopian, books on TV, feminist fiction

“So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet” (277).  

The Testaments picks up about 16 years after the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale. The story is told from the alternating perspectives of Agnes (a girl of indeterminate age raised in Gilead), Daisy (a teen girl raised in Canada), and Aunt Lydia (yes, that Aunt Lydia!). From Aunt Lydia’s secret diary, more details are revealed about the takeover of the United States by the Gilead government and how women were (literally) herded and sent to different parts of this new country to fulfill specific roles. Since Lydia was a single woman, her experience differs (but is just as horrific) from June/Offred in THT. TV Aunt Lydia, from the Hulu adaptation of the book, is cruel and psychotic, while Book Lydia is more nuanced. Her behavior is driven by an underlying motive which is slowly unveiled as the book progresses. We discover how Aunt Lydia’s personal background transformed her from an everyday citizen (a family court judge, in her case) to one of the most feared Aunts in Gilead: “I needed to revert to the mulish underclass child, the determined drudge, the brainy overachiever, the strategic ladder-climber who’d got me to the social perch from which I’d just been deposed. I needed to work the angles, once I could find out what the angles were. I’d been in tight corners before, I had prevailed. That was my story to myself” (117).  

Agnes and Jemima are each affected by parallel events in their lives- events that expose lies from the adults sworn to protect them. These two girls are also interconnected on a more fundamental level (I don’t want to give too much away, so you’ll have to read The Testaments for yourself). From these young girls’ perspectives, the reader learns how young children are indoctrinated into the Gilead ideology early, the expectations of women, and how regimented the social hierarchy of Gilead society is. As with most totalitarian governments, fear, backbiting, and false accusations are rampant. The rigidity also makes Gilead prone to moral rot (not that it was built on good morals to begin with) and massive political corruption- which eventually contributes to the downfall of Gilead.