The Testaments

“Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.” 

Agnes’s descriptions of her lessons in the Vidala School provide a comprehensive look at the way in which Aunts indoctrinated privileged girls into correct behavior. The Aunts condemn things as simple and natural as a little girl having a best friend, as they see it as a slippery slope to capital crimes. This is evidence that it is not only Handmaids who believe that the slightest act deviating from prescribed behavior will lead to punishment and ruin. It is also interesting that the worst possible crime of rebellion ascribed to women, worse than treason, is adultery.

“That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.” 

Daisy begins her testimony with foreshadowing, by describing how her 16th birthday was the occasion that changed her identity. That day, she learns that everything she had thought she had known about herself had not been true, through no fault of her own. Other people had constructed her identity before she was old enough to know who she truly was. This realization leaves Daisy with a crisis of self.

“Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting. What I mean is, she didn’t smell to me like my mother.” 

Though she did not understand why, Daisy had always felt a sense of distance from her parents. The sense of smell is primal, and Daisy’s subconscious senses that Melanie is not the person whose scent had been there when she was a newborn. Melanie is kind and comforting to Daisy, but she lacks the pheromones that would mark her to Daisy as her mother. When Daisy/Nicole finally meets her birth mother, she knows that she is truly her mother because she smells “right.”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.” 

By writing down her memoirs, Aunt Lydia seeks to explain why she became the ruthless monster that haunted the nightmares of Handmaids and children in Gilead. She had had a choice: to resist the new regime and be tortured or murdered, or to aid them in their oppression. She claims that her path, the path of cooptation, is the path most travelled, implying that most people, given this choice, choose not to resist. She notes that that path also often leads to death, but she has endured.

“‘This story is God’s way of telling us that we should be content with our lot and not rebel against it.’ The man in charge should be honored by the woman, she said. If not, this was the result. God always made the punishment fit the crime.” 

Aunt Vidala enjoys emphasizing the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces, to promote constant obedience to the regime and men. The slightest act of resentment or dissent on the part of a woman toward the man set above her by God is not to be tolerated and would always result in punishment for the woman. The concubine in the story had dared to run away from her owner, so she is raped to death, which Aunt Vidala views as a fitting punishment.

“No wonder Paula and Commander Kyle wanted a Handmaid: they wanted a real child instead of me. I was nobody’s child.” 

Agnes learns the devastating truth that Tabitha had not been her original mother, that her birth mother had been a Handmaid. Agnes now understands why Commander Kyle has always been so distant from her. She had been Tabitha’s “project,” an indulgence by Commander Kyle. Now Paula seeks to produce a replacement for her as the child of the household. Agnes is bereft, feeling a complete lack of familial belonging.

“Elijah looked down at the floor again. Then he looked straight at me. ‘You are Baby Nicole.’” 

Daisy finally learns her true identity, and she could not be more shocked. It was traumatic enough to learn that Neil and Melanie had not been her real parents, now she learns that she had been born in Gilead to a Handmaid. Discovering that she is the Baby Nicole that she has known as a cause celebré is more than Daisy can absorb. She had studied Baby Nicole, had even written a report on her, and sees posters of her constantly. It is a little like being told you are really Anne Frank, if Anne Frank had disappeared as a baby and was used as an icon of the Holocaust.

“They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.” 

As Aunt Lydia describes her initial arrest and imprisonment in the stadium, she gives details of how the men debased and humiliated she and her fellow prisoners. These well-educated, intelligent professional women in their business attire have to live in filthy conditions. This is the first stage in breaking these women down, by showing them how powerless they are, how useless their degrees in law, business, and medicine now are. They live in an elemental level of hunger, thirst, and excrement. 

“For there was a bargain. Of course there was. Though I didn’t make it with the Devil: I made it with Commander Judd.” 

Commander Judd is Aunt Lydia’s mentor and enemy right from the beginning of the construction of the Gilead regime. He recognizes her worth as an accomplished, highly intelligent woman who can help develop the women’s sphere, but first he must completely break her of her outer sense of ego. He shows her that she is at his mercy, that he has the power over life and death for her. Lydia accepts his bargain and becomes his useful tool, but she internalizes every offense he has done and bides her time until she can take her revenge.

“I was feeling more and more hopeless. Gilead had all the power. They’d killed Melanie and Neil, they would track down my unknown mother and kill her too, they would wipe out Mayday. They would get hold of me somehow and drag me into Gilead, where the women might as well be house cats and everyone was a religious maniac.” 

As Daisy prepares for her mission into Gilead, the more she learns, the more disheartened she becomes about the chances of defeating Gilead. She is just one person, and a young girl feeling adrift in the world. Even with Ada and Garth to train and encourage her, Daisy is very unhappy to be going on her mission. She never really has a chance to say no and somehow feels like she is just floating along on the tide of everyone else’s plans.

“How might I best set the members of the triumvirate eager to overthrow me against one another, all the better to pick them off one by one?” 

Through years of effort, Aunt Lydia has distinguished herself as the leader of the Founding Aunts and of Ardua Hall itself, which doesn’t endear her to the others. In the present time, she still must work to pit the others against each other, rather than having them join forces against her. Learning that Aunt Vidala has been scheming to discredit both herself and Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Lydia contemplates how best to proceed. Divide and conquer is always her strategy, but it is a delicate operation.

“I would be as wan and bloodless as poor Ofkyle had been—cut open to get her baby out, then lying still, wrapped in a sheet, staring at me with her silent eyes.” 

Agnes receives a terrible lesson in the devaluation of women in Gilead when Ofkyle dies giving birth. Given the choice between losing the baby or killing Ofkyle by cutting the baby out of her, the doctor doesn’t hesitate. Ofkyle is just a woman. Agnes worries when she is being prepared for marriage, that she will suffer the same fate, since a baby would of greater value than herself.

“Then they looked at my tattoo, and said I was a very special person to have undergone all that suffering for God, and they were glad I knew God cherished me. And Gilead would cherish me too because I was a precious flower, every woman was a precious flower, and especially every girl of my age, and if I was in Gilead I would be treated like the special girl I was, and protected, and no one—no man—would ever be able to hurt me.”

Daisy experiences Gilead propaganda first-hand when she meets the Pearl Girls. What they tell her is contrary to what she has learned about Gilead, but Daisy still responds to their caring words. She knows that they are only trying to appeal to her because they want her as a convert, but Daisy has been through so much recent trauma that it feels good for someone to promise safety. The Pearl Girls assume that Garth has been abusing Daisy and promise her protection from harm by men, a highly suspect claim.

“So I focused on their uniforms, but I could sense eyes, eyes, eyes, all over me like hands. I’d never felt so much at risk in that way—not even under the bridge with Garth, and with strangers all around.” 

When Daisy first encounters men in Gilead, she feels a sense of danger. The way these uniformed men look at her is terrifying, and she instinctively experiences a feeling of violation. The institutionalized misogyny of Gilead is like nothing Daisy has ever suffered, but she knows it when she sees it. Up to then, the scariest experience Daisy had had was sleeping under a bridge, but that pales in comparison to walking past a group of Angels.

“My larger fear: that all my efforts will prove futile, and Gilead will last for a thousand years. Most of the time, that is what it feels like here, far away from the war, in the still heart of the tornado.”

Aunt Lydia knows all too well that, despite her tireless work to gather information that will take down Gilead, history is not on her side. She knows about the rot and corruption at the regime’s heart, but the outer stability, evidenced by the placid streets and compliant citizens, makes her fear that the regime is unassailable. Aunt Lydia is a student of history and she knows that other authoritarian theocracies have proven their resilience. 

“The Founders and the older Aunts had edges to them. They’d been moulded in an age before Gilead, they’d had struggles we had been spared, and these struggles had ground off the softness that might once have been there. But we hadn’t been forced to undergo such ordeals.” 

Agnes enters training to become a Supplicant and sees the daily world of Aunts. In doing so, she sees the difference between the younger Aunts, who grew up in Gilead, and the older Aunts, who were mature women when Gilead began. Women revere and fear the Founders for their intimidating strength. They had suffered in ways that the younger women cannot understand, and they expect Agnes and her generation to be grateful that they won’t suffer as they had to. What the younger generation has truly avoided the crushing process by which modern American women became Gilead women, though they are not told this explicitly.

“But as I discovered what had been changed by Gilead, what had been added, and what had been omitted, I feared I might lose my faith.” 

Agnes experiences a crisis of faith as she learns the actual content of the Bible and sees how the Gilead leadership has twisted portions of scripture to conform to Gilead theology, with the suppression of women at its core. Agnes had never doubted the rightness of what she was taught about religion, so to learn that God is being used as a tool by the outwardly pious and irreproachable Gilead elite to maintain their power, is unbearable. 

“Am I capable of such duplicity? Could I betray so completely? Having tunneled this far under the foundations of Gilead with my stash of cordite, might I falter? As I am human, it is entirely possible.” 

As the time draws nearer for Aunt Lydia’s plans to come to fruition, she wavers a bit in her resolve. She knows that she does still have the option of abandoning her plan for the destruction of Gilead. She could instead turn Nicole over to Commander Judd, though that would mean the death of Nicole, as well as Becka, Agnes, and Shunammite. Aunt Lydia does not know if she could do such a cowardly and despicable thing, but she is human, and it is all too human to choose a safe, if despicable path. She had done so once before.

“I wanted to think that love and warmth were radiating out of this picture—not a flattering picture, but that didn’t matter. I wanted to think that this love was flowing into my hand.”

Agnes sees an actual picture of her mother, giving a face to the blank question mark she had had in her heart. Since finding out that Tabitha was not her mother, Agnes has longed to fill the gap inside of her where her mother’s face belongs. Though she thinks it childish, Agnes puts her hand on top of the picture, wishing for love and warmth, all the things one associates with a mother, to physically flow into her hand. She wants some magical connection.

“‘She is in this room,’ Aunt Lydia announced. She waved a hand. ‘Jade here is Baby Nicole.’

‘It can’t be!’ I said. Jade was Baby Nicole? Therefore Jade was my sister?

Becka sat with her mouth open, staring at Jade. ‘No,’ she whispered. Her face was woeful.

‘Sorry about not being adorable,’ Jade said. ‘I tried, but I’m terrible at it.’ I believe she meant it as a joke, to lighten the atmosphere.” 

This exchange shows the reactions of this group, as Aunt Lydia introduces Jade as Baby Nicole. Aunt Lydia has been playing with Agnes and Becka a bit, keeping them in suspense. It is a shock when she finally completes her revelation. Agnes feels flabbergasted that Jade, such an uncouth, frustrating, condescending, “not nice” girl, is both the holy Baby Nicole and her actual sister. Becka is both saddened that Agnes has a genuine sister to replace her and that that sister is Jade, whom she also dislikes. Nicole makes a joke to relieve the feeling that Agnes is rejecting her.

“I thought of asking her how long we had to keep it up, this Gilead way of talking—couldn’t we stop and act natural, now that we were escaping? But then, maybe for her it was natural. Maybe she didn’t know another way.” 

Nicole is anxious as they make their escape out of Gilead and tries to diminish her fear by speaking more like her normal self, but Agnes keeps stopping her and continuing to speak in what Nicole calls “her pious Aunt voice.” Nicole would like them to start speaking more “naturally” so that she can relax a bit, but t she realizes that for Agnes, this is her natural way of speaking. It occurs to Nicole that Agnes is leaving the place where she knows how to speak and act, while Nicole is returning to her natural environment.

“‘But I thought you grasped the true goal of our mission,’ she said. ‘The salvation of Gilead. The purification. The renewal. That is the reason.’” 

Nicole wonders what possible reason God had for ruining her life. Agnes is sincerely surprised, thinking that Nicole had already understood that God’s plan for her was this mission, which Agnes sees as the salvation and renewal of Gilead. Nicole believes, like her Mayday counterparts, that her mission is to destroy Gilead completely. 

“She only used the one arm because she had her other arm around Agnes, and she said, ‘My darling girls.’” 

The reunion of Offred and both of her daughters finally occurs. All three of them have gone through much suffering on the way to this moment. Nicole reaches for her mother automatically, instinctively knowing who she is, though she can only hug her with one arm, the other wrapped up due to infection. Their mother puts one arm around Nicole as well, for the other is around Agnes, so all three of them are joined together at last.