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
Nicole thought they were going to die, but they made it. She is proud of Agnes in that moment for persevering and feels that they truly are sisters for the first time. Agnes supports her as they make their way up the slippery rocks. Nicole is delirious and feels as if her infected arm is no longer a part of her body, just a piece of flesh attached by the skin. As she stumbles onward, Nicole hears Becka beside them, encouraging her to press on. Lights shine over a ridge ahead of them and voices approach. Ada, holding a flashlight, comes down to them and Garth scoops Nicole up in his arms. At the top of the hill, TV cameramen are waiting for them. Nicole falls unconscious.
Although Nicole and Agnes formerly were terse and rather disconnected from each other, their newfound closeness suggests that shared suffering and difficult experiences can create intimacy and affection between individuals. Notably, Nicole, though delirious from fever, seems to feel this same newfound affection for Becka as well, seemingly because she knows that Becka faced danger and sacrifice for their sakes even if she did so alone in Gilead.
Themes
Nicole and Agnes are airlifted to a medical station for refugees, where doctors load Nicole up with antibiotics. When she awakes in a hospital bed, her arm is less swollen and painful. Agnes is sitting next to her, and Ada, Elijah, and Garth are there as well. Ada and Elijah tell Nicole that she and Agnes are on every news station, and that the cache of information that Lydia sent with them is being broadcast all over the world. Gilead hasn’t fallen yet, but it’s starting to, despite the news there saying, “it’s all fake.” Nicole asks where Becka is, but Agnes gingerly reminds her that Becka didn’t escape with them. Nicole insists that she was there with them on the beach.
Gilead’s early signs of ruin suggests that knowledge truly is power, as Lydia believed, and that the simple truth of Gilead’s horrific practices and rampant corruption are the most effective weapons with which to fight it or any authoritarian power’s domination. Gilead’s news organization arguing that the damning evidence is faked seems to be a nod to America’s news environment since 2016, in which politicians and public figures attempt to dispute stories and change public record by simply claiming anything that casts them in a poor light is “fake news.”
Themes
Nicole falls asleep again, but when she awakes her mother is there waiting for her, looking like an older version of the picture from the genealogical archives. She’s crying, and Nicole thinks that she looks both “sad and happy.” Nicole and Agnes’s mother leans down and hugs both of them in her arms, and Nicole thinks that she has the right smell and feel that seems nearly familiar. She doesn’t have any memories of her mother from her childhood, but now she can make them.
Nicole’s feeling that the mother who meets her in the hospital smells right and feels right hearkens back to her earlier feelings that, although Neil and Melanie loved her, they never quite felt right as her parents. This suggests that in spite of love, there is some sort of biological bond that undeniably connects mothers with their children.
Themes
