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
Aunt Vidala has awoken but cannot yet speak, and Lydia knows that Vidala will already understand that she is behind the entire plot. Meanwhile, rumor has it that Vidala’s brief coma was not the result of a stroke but some sort of attack, since there are marks of a struggle in the soil where she was found. Angels have been sent to search for Jade and the eloping plumber in the nearby vicinity, but have found nothing, and Elizabeth grows more suspicious by the hour of the entire situation, though does not yet suspect Lydia.
All of the circumstances enclosing on Lydia suggest that her days are numbered; she will soon be found out to be the plotting traitor that she is. Although Lydia decided to exercise restraint and not murder Vidala when she had the chance, the new threat that Vidala poses suggests that in such situations, the most moral option is not necessarily the best one.
Themes
Commander Judd is both enraged and terrified that Baby Nicole has escaped, since his and Lydia’s reputations will be ruined if word gets out, making them both very vulnerable before the Council. Meanwhile a maintenance crew has found Aunt Immortelle’s body floating in the cistern. She took her outer garments and carefully folded them so that someone else could make use of them in the future. Lydia is saddened by her suicide, by maintains to herself that it was Becka’s willing sacrifice.
Becka’s suicide to avoid being arrested and tortured parallels her suicide attempt to avoid being imprisoned in a forced marriage and represents her final assertion of her own agency. Becka’s decision to choose to die rather than be passively imprisoned suggests her personal agency and power to choose was more important to her than life itself. Though hardly mentioned and never explained, Judd’s fear of the Council suggests that even he answers to someone else.
Themes
Word arrives that two Pearl Girls were spotted making their way through New Hampshire, seemingly headed for Canada, and most realize that this must be Aunt Victoria and Jade. Judd sends his operatives to hunt for them, authorizing them to shoot both girls down if they try to escape. Confronting Lydia, Judd also realizes that Nicole was sent into Gilead as an operative, but Lydia continues to feign ignorance and accepts her responsibility for failing to see through the Mayday plot. Lydia has a brief flashback of when she stood in the stadium, brown-robed, and raised her rifle. She is sure there was a bullet in her rifle, despite what Judd said.
Judd’s determination that the escaped girls should be shot rather than let escape suggests that he has no care for their well-being whatsoever, but rather is motivated primarily be fear of what public knowledge of Nicole’s escape would do to his and Gilead’s reputation. Lydia’s flashback and certainty that her rifle fired a bullet suggests that she is taking personal responsibility for all of the deaths she has caused in her time, including Becka’s—and Agnes and Nicole’s, should they fail to reach Canada.
Themes
Lydia revisits Vidala and finds Elizabeth sitting by her bedside. She sends Elizabeth briefly away for a cup of tea and wakes Vidala once she is alone with her. Vidala opens her eyes and whispers clearly that she knows Lydia is behind everything, and that she’ll see her hanged. Vidala falls back asleep. When Elizabeth returns, Lydia tells her that Vidala accused Elizabeth of attacking her. Elizabeth is mortified, but Lydia suggests that they can still fix this, and implies that as soon as she leaves, Elizabeth should smother Vidala with her pillow. It will look like an asthma attack. As she leaves, Lydia thinks of Agnes and Nicole on the run, her “destroying angels.”
Once again, Lydia demonstrates her own ruthlessness not only by killing Vidala, but by implicating Elizabeth in her murder so as to have better control over her. This again characterizes Lydia as a complex protagonist, an anti-hero who achieves a noble goal through vicious means. Her consideration of Agnes and Nicole as her “destroying angels” suggests that like Nicole, Lydia ultimately expects that Gilead’s entire regime must fall.
Themes
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