The sisterhood of ‘The Testaments’
Margaret Atwood crafts an optimistic sequel to the dystopic ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s 1986 dystopian novel about a woman known as Offred living under the oppressively misogynistic regime of Gilead in what was once the United States, has, for better or worse, become even more relevant in the 33 years since its publication.
This is true not only in a popular culture sense — Hulu’s award-winning adaptation of the book just concluded its third season — but also in a social sense, as the right of women to control their own bodies has increasingly come under fire from various states, emboldened by the conservative bent of the current Supreme Court. This renewed relevance comes to fruition in Ms. Atwood’s new novel, “The Testaments,” the longawaited sequel to her classic work. Fans of “The Handmaid’s Tale” are now given a chance to learn what happened to both Offred and Gilead itself; the result is a sobering, yet almost joyful story of how totalitarianism propagates itself — and how it may be ended.
Set 15 years after the events of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments” is composed of three separate narratives with very different points of view: a written account by the powerful Aunt Lydia, one of the main antagonists of the previous book; and the testimonies of two young women — the pious Agnes, raised inside Gilead, and the incredulous Daisy, raised in Canada.
Aunt Lydia is the leader of the Aunts — the women tasked with ensuring the subjugation of their gender under the Gilead regime. While she freely admits to the terrible things she has done in the name of Gilead, she also reveals that she has been secretly planning to expose the hypocritical and menacing actions of the ruling class to the outside world, in the hope that it will accelerate the disintegration of the regime.
Meanwhile, the testimony of Agnes portrays how Gilead looks to young women who have been brought up never knowing the freedoms they would have once enjoyed. Her primary duty is to acclimatize herself to the narrow roles available to her; these roles are portrayed by the Aunts as a relief from the treatment women were exposed to in the pre-Gilead era — with graphic emphasis on rape, sexual assault and pornography as common occurrences. As such, the young women of Gilead do not comply with the regime out of