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 reflects on her first days in Ardua Hall, when she and Becka are still children and when Becka shows her around and introduces her to this new world. Agnes has no concept of what a library or a map is, but Becka explains that here they have access to information of all sorts, with the right rank and permission. In Ardua Hall, punishment for breaking the rules is done privately, down in the cellars, rather than in public like the rest of society. As Becka explains, she helps Agnes find an outfit and choose a name for herself, settling on Aunt Victoria.
Agnes’s entrance into Ardua Hall represents a critical development in her character arc, where she is encouraged for the first time to learn, educate herself, and utilize all of the capacities of her woman’s brain. For Agnes, the fact that she is able and encouraged to learn defies Gilead’s teaching that women’s brains are naturally less capable or different in any way to men’s brains.
Themes
Agnes frets about whether she will be allowed to stay beyond her first six months and struggles to learn to read and to be appropriately deferential to the senior Aunts. Becka knows of one girl who, after being punished in the cellars, did not want to become an Aunt but also didn’t want to be married. She wanted to go live alone and keep a farm. Vidala claimed this was evidence she had been taught to read before her mind was ready to reject such ideas and locked her in the cellar for a month. When the girl emerged, Vidala announced that she would still be married, but rather than go through with it, the girl drowned herself in the rain cistern on the roof. Agnes thinks this is horrible, but Becka says that “some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
Vidala’s belief that the dissenting Aunt was given access to the library before the Aunt’s mind was strong enough to reject such ideas that did not fit with Gilead suggests that even the Aunts are expected to be sufficiently indoctrinated before they are given access to literature or allowed to see how the outside world operates. This fear that Gilead’s women might discover that other people live differently exposes just how dismal and inequitable life in Gilead is for women and demonstrates how a regime might control and repress its people through enforced ignorance.
Themes
While Agnes is learning to read, she practices with poems that Vidala wrote about girls seducing men or catching their eyes, and the graphic results of such sins. Becka remarks that she’d never want any attention from a man, even “the Gilead kind of God.” Agnes is stunned at this statement, but Becka tells her that Gilead leaves a lot of things out of the Bible, like the fact that both men and women bear God’s image. Agnes can see for herself once she’s allowed to read it. Agnes is still disturbed by this, though, since Vidala would call it heresy.
Becka’s claim that Gilead’s idea of God does not fit the Bible’s idea of God echoes Agnes’s thoughts in Chapter 2 that Gilead is “surely contrary to what God intended.” It suggests that Gilead’s regime is not Atwood’s criticism of Christianity or the Bible in and of themselves, but of the abuse of religious power to establish and support an authoritarian regime, which has happened often throughout history but, according to Becka, does not represent the religion’s true aims.
Themes
Shunammite visits during Agnes’s second month with the Aunts, gloating about her new marriage to Commander Judd and how many Marthas she now has. Agnes realizes that Shunammite now outranks Paula, which must infuriate Paula. Shunammite can tell that Agnes is not altogether pleased to see her, but Agnes insists that’s just part of becoming an Aunt.
Shunammite represents a foil to both Becka and Agnes, demonstrating what they could become if they would conform to Gilead’s strict gender roles and arranged marriages, and enjoy the status and material benefits that result.
Themes
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