Gilead, in all its repression, corruption, and brutality, is awash with secrets: who murdered whom, which biblical teachings are outright fraudulent, what really goes on in the highest levels of government. Gilead’s government goes to great lengths to keep those secrets. As a result, general citizens (and especially women) are kept as ignorant as possible, since Gilead’s leadership understands that the truth is a danger to them and the right knowledge in the right hands could spell their own doom. This turns out to be a well-founded fear since Aunt Lydia, though a woman, uses her knowledge to become one of the most powerful figures in Gilead and ultimately bring its injustice to an end. Through Gilead’s enforced ignorance and Lydia’s leverage of knowledge to assert power and destroy the unjust regime, the narrative argues that knowledge is power and truth is the greatest weapon for fighting injustice.
Gilead goes to great lengths to keep women ignorant, suggesting that enforced ignorance is a means of control, and knowledgeable women would thus threaten that control. Except for the Aunts, who are kept apart from the rest of society, women are strictly forbidden from learning how to read. From a young age, girls are taught that books are “evil” and full of “forbidden things,” so that they will not read about other, freer women and begin to question the way that they live within Gilead. Even for those women who become Aunts, they are not allowed to access any books or new ideas until their minds are “strengthened enough to reject them,” suggesting that Gilead’s leadership fears even the Aunts being exposed to new ideas until they are sufficiently indoctrinated. Gilead’s fear of women reading and learning suggests that they know that their own control is built on flimsy premises. This is particularly evident in their treatment of the Bible, on which they claim to base their society. Even when Becka or other high-ranking Aunts are allowed to read the Bible, they are forbidden from discussing it with anyone else at all, since its actual support for Gilead’s structure and control is incredibly weak. This again suggests that such knowledge in the right hands would thus be a threat to Gilead or any such oppressive regime.
Aunt Lydia is the most powerful character in the story, despite being a woman, because she knows how to gather and utilize knowledge, demonstrating that knowledge is power even within a repressive environment. As the leading Aunt in Gilead since its inception and a master of clandestine surveillance, Lydia amasses decade’s worth of criminal evidence against individuals at every level of power in Gilead, such as recordings of sexual assault, evidence of bribery, and photos and videos of various murders committed by heads of state. This accumulated knowledge gives Lydia the power to preserve herself even when other powerful figures, such as her rival Aunt Vidala, want to destroy her, since Lydia has set up several mechanisms to release all of that information if her life is ended. Lydia’s knowledge of Gilead’s inner workings and misdealing allows her to manipulate events and rescue other women as she can. When Agnes is about to be forced to marry the powerful Commander Judd, who has a history of murdering his wives, Lydia leverages her knowledge against both Judd and Agnes’s stepmother. She forces them to let Agnes be made an Aunt instead, thus saving Agnes from marriage. Lydia does the same for Becka and several other unnamed women, thus demonstrating that knowledge can grant not only the power to save oneself, but also to save others as well. Although she is constantly under threat as a woman in a strictly patriarchal regime, Lydia even exerts power over Commander Judd, one of the most powerful men in the country, by leveraging her knowledge of his pedophilia and murders of multiple young wives so that he could have a new, younger one in their place. Lydia’s ability to even overpower the story’s most powerful man suggests that the power knowledge grants can even supersede strict gender roles and oppressive power structures.
When Lydia finally releases her decades’ worth of evidence of the grotesque crimes of Gilead’s leadership, the world is so outraged at the gross injustice that the theocratic regime swiftly falls to international pressure and local rebellions, demonstrating that knowledge—and ultimately truth—is a powerful weapon to fight injustice. After Nicole successfully infiltrates Gilead on behalf of a resistance movement, posing as new covert to Gilead’s religion, Lydia implants all of the evidence and knowledge she has carefully gathered in a microfilm into Nicole’s arm, before orchestrating her and Agnes’s escape back to Canada. The Canadian government swiftly disseminates the information across the whole world, and overnight Gilead’s leaders and power figures are entirely discredited and made the most hated people on earth, which builds enough pressure to topple the regime and restore it as the United States of America between the novel’s ending and the epilogue. In spite of Gilead’s strength and military power, all that it took to end its injustice was the truth of what truly goes on beneath its secretive veneer. This ending strongly argues that knowledge is power, and truth is thus ultimately the most powerful tool for fighting injustice across the world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Truth, Knowledge, and Power ThemeTracker
Truth, Knowledge, and Power 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.
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’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her. I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back.
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.
I did not wish Aunt Sally dead: I simply wished her incoherent; and so it has been. The Margery Kempe Retreat House has a discreet staff.
What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot? Better to fade into the crowd, the piously-praising, unctuous, hate-mongering crowd. Better to hurl rocks than have them hurled at you. Or better for your chances of staying alive.
“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.”
Becka had decided to offer up this silent suffering of hers as a sacrifice to God. I am not sure what God though of this, but it did not do the trick for me. Once a judge, always a judge. I judged, I pronounced the sentence.
The Angel’s real crime was not [smuggling] the lemons, however: he’d been accused of taking bribes from Mayday and aiding several Handmaids in their successful flight across our various borders. But the Commanders did not want this fact publicized: it would give people ideas. The official line is that there were no corrupt Angels and certainly no fleeing Handmaids; for why would one renounce God’s kingdom to plunge into the flaming pit?
“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.
“God isn’t what they say,” [Becka] said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.
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?
As we went north, the friendliness decreased: there were angry looks, and I had the feeling that our Pearl Girls mission and even the whole Gilead thing was leaking popularity. No one spat at us, but they scowled as if they would like to.
I had a flashback, not for the first time. In my brown sackcloth robe I raised the gun, aimed, shot. A bullet, or no bullet?
A bullet.
