Gilead’s social structure is premised on its belief that men and women are unequal, which the leadership argues is biologically evident. Men, Gilead believes, are intelligent, sophisticated, and natural leaders, while women are presumed to be stupid, infantile, and weak, only fit for giving birth or doing chores in the home. Because of this belief, Gilead’s laws strictly enforce gender roles and contradicting them is punishable by public execution. Even so, the female characters are more than capable of doing “men’s work,” and are completely unhindered by their gender, in spite of Gilead’s beliefs. Although Gilead enforces strict gender roles that it argues are biologically determined, the novel’s female characters demonstrate that women can do any task just as well as men, which suggests that narrowly defined gender roles are ultimately baseless, instilled only by society.
Gilead enforces strict gender roles by arguing that they are based in biology, which in turn affects how its women see themselves, suggesting that strict enforcement of gender roles and norms can lead women to have a lower view of their own capacities. Gilead relegates women to minor reductive roles in society, allowing them only to be Marthas (house servants), Handmaids (fertile women forced to bear children for powerful, married men—the lowest position in society), or wives. Additionally, a very small number are able to become Aunts, working as female administrators over other women. Men, however, are allowed to be leaders, doctors, scientists, or to hold any other professional capacity. These gender roles are taught to young girls at an early age to indoctrinate them into accepting their very limited position in life. In their early education, Agnes and Becka are taught that, biologically, men’s brains are “hard” and “focused” while theirs are “soft” and ill-suited to any complicated task, fundamentally less capable than any man’s brain. This justification, though obviously false, leads Agnes to have a disparaging view of her own intelligence. After being taught that she has a naturally weaker brain, she sadly envisions that it is nothing more than a pile of “warmed-up mud,” demonstrating that such strict and narrow gender roles can lead women to have a low view of their own capabilities. A disturbing aspect of women’s resultant sense of inferiority is that it leads them to defer to men, their supposed superiors, even when doing so puts them in danger. When Agnes is just beginning to enter puberty, Becka’s father, Dr. Grove, sexually assaults her, but Agnes knows that she cannot resist or tell anyone about it since her abuser is a man, and thus more important and intelligent than herself. Agnes’s pained silence emphasizes that such gender roles not only can create an under-developed sense of self for women, but also put them in danger and inhibit their ability to stand up for themselves.
Despite these narrow gender roles and low view of women’s capabilities, several female characters prove that they are more than capable of performing “male” roles, arguing thus that Gilead’s strict gender roles have no biological basis. Agnes’s secret younger sister, Nicole, grows up in Canada, outside of the gender bias of Gilead, and thus shows far more confidence in her own capacities. As an operative for a resistance movement trying to penetrate Gilead, Nicole learns several “male” skills, such as how to handle a boat and how to fight in hand-to-hand combat, which she does successfully to protect herself. Nicole’s ability to operate and defend herself just as well as any man, despite being a young woman, suggests that Gilead’s rigid gender roles have no basis in biological or practical reality. Even within Gilead, the Aunts’ very existence defies any real distinction between men and women’s capabilities, pointing out that such narrow gender roles are baseless. Although women are taught that they are incapable of leadership or advanced thought, the Aunts are literate, capable, cunning, and often use their knowledge to manipulate events and subtly advance their own power in society. Although Gilead’s leadership classifies leadership and administration as men’s roles, their society is dependent on the Aunts carrying out their duties as administrators. Gilead’s best attempt at explaining the Aunts’ obvious capability is that their brains are somehow “different” than normal women’s brains—Agnes wonders as a child if Aunts’ brains are “neither male nor female”—which makes them useful as public servants but unfit for marriage or family. When Becka and Agnes both become Aunts, they overcome their “mud brains” and learn how to read and how to reason, They discover that in spite of the low view of their own intelligence they were raised to have, they are every bit as intelligent as any men, and that Gilead’s rigid gender roles were merely designed to keep them down.
When the lead female characters step out from under Gilead’s expectations of how women will behave and view themselves, Gilead ultimately falls. The symbolic victory of women over an oppressive men’s regime suggests that not only are such gender roles only socially constructed, but that women can be a powerful force when unhindered by societal expectations. This liberation is briefly symbolized when Agnes wears pants for the first time during her escape from Gilead. Having spent her entire life in long skirts as Gilead’s laws demand of women, Agnes is at first disturbed by the thought of wearing what she perceives to be men’s clothes. However, the first time she climbs a ladder, she realizes how much freer her legs are to move without the confines of a long skirt, suggesting that without the confines of her gendered role in society, she is far more capable. Atwood’s message extends beyond Gilead, too. Through The Testaments, Atwood leads readers to consider how such strict gender roles persist in modern society, ultimately arguing that they are unnecessary and inhibit women’s full potential.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Gender Roles ThemeTracker
Gender Roles Quotes in The Testaments
Hanging from a belt around my waist is a taser. This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement.
Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge.
I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?
I know too much about the leaders—too much dirt—and they are uncertain as to what I may have done with it in the way of documentation. If they string me up, will that dirt somehow be leaked? They might well suspect I’ve taken back up precautions, and they would be right.
Her name was Ofkyle, since my father’s name was Commander Kyle. “Her name would have been something else earlier,” said Shunammite. “Some other man’s. They get passed around until they have a baby. They’re all sluts anyway, they don’t need real names.”
Aunt Estee […] always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? [Aunt Estee] didn’t finish the sentence.
Like warmed-up mud in the sun, I thought. That what was inside my head: warmed-up mud.
The truth was that they’d cut Crystal open to get the baby out, and they’d killed her by doing that. It wasn’t something she chose. She hadn’t volunteered to die with noble womanly honor or be a shining example, but nobody mentioned that.
To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. There were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that as if on a magical charm.
But the goal in every instance was the same: girls of all kinds—those from good families as well as the less favored—were to be married early, before any chance encounter with an unsuitable man might occur that would lead to what used to be called falling in love or, worse, to loss of virginity.
[Becka] really did believe that marriage would obliterate her. She would be crushed, she would be nullified, she would be melted like snow until nothing remained of her.
But if we were to put too much emphasis on the theoretical delights of sex, the result would almost certainly be curiosity and experimentation, followed by moral degeneracy and public stonings.
“Perhaps one day you will be able to help me as you yourself have been helped. Good should be repaid with good. That is one of our rules of thumb, here at Ardua Hall.”
Aunt Beatrice ordered in pizza for lunch, which we had with ice cream from the freezer. I said I was surprised that they were eating junk food: wasn’t Gilead against it, especially for women?
“It’s part of our tests as Pearl Girls,” said Aunt Dove. “We’re supposed to sample the fleshpot temptations of the outside world in order to understand them, and then reject them in our hearts.” She took another bite of pizza.
“She wanted to live on her own and work on a farm. Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Vidala said this is what came of reading too early: she’d picked up the wrong ideas at the Hildegard Library, before her mind had been strengthened enough to reject them, and there were a lot o f questionable books that should be destroyed.”
Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.
This is what the Aunts did, I was learning. They recorded. They waited. They used their information to achieve goals known only to themselves. Their weapons were powerful but contaminating secrets, as the Marthas had always said.
Was my soft, muddy brain hardening? Was I becoming stony, steely, pitiless? Was I exchanging my caring and pliable woman’s nature for an imperfect copy of a sharp-edged and ruthless man’s nature? I didn’t want that, but how to avoid it if I aspired to be an Aunt?
I was finding it easier now to go up and down the ladder that led to our sleeping quarters, and reflected that it would have been much harder in a long skirt.
