The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
This spinoff to The Handmaid's Tale deals with knowledge, power, and the deadly errors of tyrants.
This is not a review. Click here to see why.
TW: discussion of sexual assault, rape
Context
This spinoff to The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the same tyrannical theocracy (the Republic of Gilead), alternates between the perspectives of three very different women. Aunt Lydia, the only character who’s in both this novel and the original, was coerced into helping shape the regime when it took over, but covertly uses that power for justice as often as possible. Agnes is the biological daughter of a Handmaid (a woman forced to conceive a child for the Commander she’s assigned to) who’s raised as the daughter of a Commander and his wife; she’s groomed to become a Wife to a high-ranking man herself, but eventually decides to follow her friend Becka into the service of the Aunts, the nunlike organization that manages marriage and women’s education. Daisy is an ordinary teenager who grew up in Canada in the care of people she eventually learns are operatives of Mayday, the organization that resists Gilead.
Key Ideas
Power over others corrupts
Knowledge is the enemy of tyranny
Underestimating your opponents can be deadly
Power over others corrupts
Aunt Lydia builds up a huge amount of influence in Gilead, especially considering that she’s a woman in an explicitly patriarchal society in which women are supposed to be responsible only for such matters as home decor and managing the Marthas. She insists that the class of women known as “Aunts”—who don’t marry and are allowed to learn to read and write—should have control over the “women’s sphere” in Gilead. She gets her way, meaning that the Aunts are the teachers in the girls’ schools, the matchmakers, the torturers in the centers that brainwash new Handmaids, and the missionaries who attempt to bring new girls into the dying country.
Aunt Lydia takes full advantage of being at the head of an organization that has so much influence. She collects evidence of the crimes of the high-ranking men and their wives—from a dentist who sexually assaults his female patients to a powerful Commander who has repeatedly poisoned his wives in order to marry younger girls—and uses it against them at just the right moment.
But the reason there is so much evidence of crime and wrongdoing is because Gilead is deeply corrupt. The Commanders control every aspect of citizens’ lives and have no accountability. Presumably a few are genuine religious fanatics who stay within the laws they set. But for the majority, this power goes to their heads; they come to believe they deserve it, and if they’re clever enough to avoid the next purge they can keep indulging their whims and vices, rationalizing away whatever threatens their sense of integrity. This ultimately creates a weak spot in Gilead’s iron-fisted dictatorship.
Knowledge is the enemy of tyranny
Though Aunt Lydia primarily designs and directs the crippling blow to Gilead’s leadership that the women achieve at the end of the book, she would not have been able to complete her plan without the help of two Aunts-in-training, Becka and Agnes. She wouldn’t have been able to persuade them if they didn’t have two key pieces of knowledge they gained during their training. The first is awareness of the crime and corruption in Gilead. Aunt Lydia slips a selection of the evidence she’s gathered into their ordinary work over a long period, so that they understand that the corruption is widespread and unchecked.
The second piece of knowledge is about their religion. Becka and Agnes were raised in Gilead, meaning they didn’t learn to read as children but were told or read Bible stories in school and at home. As preparation for becoming Aunts, however, they are taught to read and study the Bible for themselves. They quickly learn that, as Becka puts it, “You could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both” (304). For example, they are told in school the story of the Concubine In Twelve Pieces. The version they’re told in school is that a concubine runs away from her loving master, who finds her in a strange town. The villagers demand that the master be turned over to them to do with as they please; the concubine bravely offers herself up instead, to make up for her wickedness in running away. In the morning, the master finds the noble concubine torn into twelve pieces. But this isn’t the version Becka and Agnes find in the Bible. In that version, the master was a cruel, harsh man. The concubine had no choice in being given to the villagers; he turned her over to them as punishment, and they raped her. Finding her in the morning near death, he himself cuts her into twelve pieces. “I looked for the brave and noble part, I looked for the choice” in the Bible, reflects a troubled Agnes, “but none of that was there” (303).1 Although both stories are awful, Gilead attempts to turn it into a moral that a woman who disobeys morally must sacrifice herself to make amends, whereas in the original, the woman has no such choice and is only a victim of those around her.
These discoveries are enough to make the girls want to drastically change Gilead, and so they are willing to help Aunt Lydia, even though she makes the risk they’re taking in doing so perfectly clear (Gilead’s leadership is fond of hanging traitors). The fact that knowledge enables Aunt Lydia to craft and execute her plan, and knowledge encourages the girls to do their part in it, shows that Atwood understands that knowledge is antithetical to tyranny. Both history and modern authoritarian states support this view; censorship, limited education, persecution of intellectuals, and closed borders are characteristic of tyrannical regimes. Communist Cambodia executed educated people and those who could speak foreign languages.2 North Korea bans practically all outside media.3 Taliban-controlled Afghanistan prevents women and girls over twelve from attending school.4 Mao’s China tortured, humiliated, and killed academics, while modern China attempts to strictly regulate what those using the Internet have access to.5 I have no particular fondness for The Washington Post, but their slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” has always seemed poignant to me.6 Though liberty is more fundamental than democracy, neither can survive long when knowledge is deliberately and systematically denied to citizens.
Underestimating your opponents can be deadly
The commanders of Gilead make two deadly errors. First, their decadence and corruption itself is a vulnerability. Authoritarian regimes must maintain some semblance of holding the moral high ground if they do not want open rebellion; this is why propaganda and censorship are key tools of tyrants. Allowing their vices to fester undermines this goal, which Aunt Lydia exploits.
Second, the commanders thoroughly underestimate women. They believe that women should focus on fulfilling their “biological destiny” of having and raising children and caring for the home; their minds aren’t fit for anything else. They happily give control of the “women’s sphere” to the Aunts, believing that it’s beneath them. But it is women who strike the first significant blow at the regime. Slipping under the radar has enabled them to gather the tools they needed to do so.
Of course, anyone can underestimate their opponent—whether in a battle, a debate, or a game of chess—and doing so is always disadvantageous. In this case, the underestimation came from a place of prejudice and blindness to counterevidence. Their irrational beliefs encouraged them to view themselves as intellectually superior to an entire group of people on the basis of their physical characteristics—and that blindness will ultimately lead to their downfall. It’s a powerful lesson in the importance of seeing reality clearly, even when it doesn’t match what we’d like to believe.
Conclusion
The Testaments shows both the forces at work in a tyranny and the choices people can make within that coercive, awful context. It shows that knowledge is power, and immorality has consequences. And it ends on a more hopeful note than The Handmaid’s Tale, showing that, with reality-orientation and courage, we can be effective against forces of evil.
The Bible story referred to is in Judges. This analysis points out some unclarity in the text, most notably about who turned the woman out to the strangers (her husband or their host) and how precisely the woman died. The woman was cut into twelve pieces to be shown to the twelve tribes of Israel, so that the husband could demand retribution; see https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/concubine-of-levite-bible.
“Cambodian Genocide,” University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian-genocide.
“Human Rights Reports: North Korea,”U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/report/custom/480b27c140/.
“Afghanistan: Teen Girls Despair as Taliban School Ban Continues,” BBC World, March 23, 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68634700.
“The Cultural Revolution: All You Need to Know about China's Political Convulsion,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion; “How Censorship Works in China,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/3.htm.
The newspaper adopted the slogan in 2017; its owner, Jeff Bezos, said it in an interview, but the Post itself traces the phrase back to an opinion written by a Supreme Court justice arguing that the government can’t wiretap individuals without a warrant; see “The Washington Post’s New Slogan Turns Out to Be an Old Saying,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-washington-posts-new-slogan-turns-out-to-be-an-old-saying/2017/02/23/cb199cda-fa02-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html.