Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Testaments, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religious Totalitarianism and Hypocrisy
Gender Roles
Truth, Knowledge, and Power
Shame, Fear, and Repression
Choice
Summary
Analysis
Agnes is enrolled in a “premarital preparatory school” to learn how to act the role of a high-ranking wife. Shunammite and Becka are there as well, both having received marriage offers from Commander families. Shunammite is eager sex and all the material benefits of marriage, but Becka is mortified. She’d begged her parents not to make her do this, but they’d argued it was the best offer she’d ever get, and if she got to 18 without being married, she’d be “dried goods” and no longer fit for a Commander’s wife.
Becka’s parents’ argument that Becka would be “dried goods” at 18 is incredibly dehumanizing, once again suggesting that Becka’s sole value as an individual and a human being is in her potential as a wife—particularly her sexual potential and fertility.
Themes
Even so, Becka is horrified at the thought of having sex with a man. The way that she describes her fear makes Agnes thinks that she has had some experience with it before, and then Agnes remembers her own experience with Dr. Grove and understands. Becka feels that marriage will “obliterate her” and bring her to an end. Shunammite thinks Becka is being weak, but Agnes hugs her tight.
Along with Becka’s total lack of choice or personal agency, her fear that marriage will “obliterate her” suggests that she will lose her sense of herself as an individual person who thinks and makes decisions, since she will be relegated to the narrowly defined and unchosen role of somebody’s wife.
Themes
