History Never Repeats: The Testaments

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus

Pp. 415

In her acknowledgements, at the end of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood thanks “the readers of The Handmaid’s Tale; their interest and curiosity has been inspiring.” If my desire to know what happened after The Handmaid’s Tale is in any part responsible for the writing of this book, 35 years after its predecessor, you’re welcome. It’s been a long time coming, but it is certainly worth it, and after all this time, it still has a clear directive: “We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.”

Much of the novel is a thinly-veiled polemic against totalitarianism. One of the narrators is Aunt Lydia, who warns against assuming all that is new is good, and ignoring past wisdom, especially that derived from women. “The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.” She keeps a secret diary, which is part confession, within the hollowed-out pages of a book, incorporating sarcasm about women’s perceived roles with asides about the veracity of history and the stories we are conditioned to believe.

Her wit and humour are displayed throughout her manuscript, and she rambles with her folksy sayings and pragmatic methods. There is a dark side to the humour, however. Some of the young girls threaten to will kill themselves if they are forced into marriage, afraid of male sexuality. “No one wants to die. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.” It is horrifically symptomatic of totalitarian regimes: women and children suffer as men rape and take what they want.

Before Gilead, Lydia was a judge, and the new (male) rulers did not want her around. “Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.” Persecution was fairly indiscriminate: “All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.” Now she is a cornerstone of the Gilead government, but she knows power can be overthrown and statues easily toppled.

Whereas The Handmaid’s Tale was focused primarily on June and the other handmaids and was claustrophobic in tone; this novel is narrated through three different voices: Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy. As the title suggests, they are putting their name to a document they have sworn to be true, and the novel opens up into a wider world. Where there are women; there is communication. “The Aunts, the Marthas, the Wives: despite the fact that they were frequently envious and resentful, and might even hate one another, news flowed among them as if along invisible spiderweb threads.”

Treatment of women by men, who seek to dominate and oppress them, is an over-arching motif. Women must be pure: those who enjoy sex and physical relationships are sluts. Women should be nurturers and carers. Women are blamed for their indiscretions; men are not held accountable for their deeds: men must act on their urges; women must not encourage them. Women exist to reproduce; their bodies are baby-making factories and do not belong to them individually. “Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estée. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha. Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?” It’s all depressingly familiar.

Aunt Lydia keeps secrets so she can blackmail people later when it is useful to do so. “All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognised this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.” Fake news and students on strike are recognisable tropes. The combination of adulterated Shakespeare and pertinence to contemporary affairs is deliberately unsettling. Atwood uses the language of fairy tales, but the chilling ones like Sleeping Beauty and later comparisons with Bluebeard.

Atwood notches up the tension as a couple of young protagonists escape Gilead by boat in a thrilling adventure, as the reader experiences the fear of young women who have never left their established order. Just as in The Handmaid’s Tale, there were cassette tapes that carried the messages of those trapped within a system; here there is another way of disseminating information and spreading the truth. Aunt Lydia thinks, “Fly well, my messengers, my silver doves, my destroying angels. Land safely.” Further parallels between the books exist in the closing of them both with a Symposium. Here the thirteenth Symposium cleverly ties it together and prevents alternative endings, while still leaving sufficient scope to flesh out. “As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”