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
Daisy recounts that she’ll begin shortly before Neil and Melanie died, on what was supposedly her 16th birthday. Daisy doesn’t want a party, but Melanie bought cake and ice cream, nonetheless. This is the day that Daisy finds out her life is a “forgery.”
It’s important to note that the narratives of Agnes, Lydia, and Daisy do not correspond chronologically with one another. Although Agnes is still a child in her last narrative, by this point in Daisy’s life, Agnes is already an adult.
Themes
Neil and Melanie, Daisy’s parents, run a secondhand clothing store called The Clothes Hound on Queen West in Toronto, filled to bursting with old fabrics and dingy clothes. Street people often come into sell their clothes as well. Melanie handles the sales floor and sorting donations, while Neil handles the business end, keeping books from a cluttered office upstairs above the store. Among old adding machines and paperwork is a shelf full of antique cameras that Daisy is not allowed to touch, and a safe with an odd metal and glass device in it. Neil, Melanie, and Daisy live in a nondescript little house in the suburbs a long distance away, which Daisy realizes in retrospect was by design.
Neil and Melanie’s operation of a secondhand clothing store frequented by street people establish them as humble and lower-class, which sharply contrasts with both Aunt Lydia and Agnes’s lives among Gilead’s elite. It additionally suggests that they are naturally philanthropic people, more interested in helping and improving the lives of others rather than increasing their own status or wealth. Their pointedly nondescript life suggests that they are hiding something as well.
Themes
