The Aunt Lydia presented here is not wholly unsympathetic. Tedious though it may be, this knowledge endows her with agency - she knows which roles to assume to survive. Well versed in literature and history, she bemoans how tedious tyranny is “in the throes of enactment,” how the plot is always the same. In The Testaments, Atwood provides her own. The Hulu series writers provided their motives for Aunt Lydia’s complex cruelty. In newspapers, we still see images of refugees in lifeboats on rough seas, stories of human trafficking and victim-blaming, struggles over abortion rights, and climate change denial.Ī knowledge of history enables Aunt Lydia - as she is known in Gilead - to anticipate coming events after an unexpected coup in the United States. The second inspiration for The Testament s, says Atwood, came as a response to the parallels between Gilead and the world we’re living in today. In the last decade, we’ve witnessed threats to bodily autonomy and Planned Parenthood, all while the climate crisis has become more urgent. Many fans thought the 1985 novel prescient when Trump came into power. Women may have been instrumental in forging Gilead, but they are also instrumental in demolishing it. Female testimonies might not be deemed important in this tyranny, but they are integral to our understanding of the greater story. They are the echoes of people saying “my life mattered” when their names and agency was erased. In writing their testimonies, our three female sources offer an alternative narrative to the patriarchal one offered by the state. In Gilead, women are supposed to be silent, illiterate witnesses, passive beyond domesticity. The regime also recognizes that stories underpin and buttress belief - the right stories, if edited to fit the political agenda, can be used for propaganda. Only those with power have access to the forbidden knowledge. Reading and writing are dangerous both can sow the seeds of doubt that encourage free-thinking and, in turn, rebellion or revolution. Like in other oppressive states where books were burned or heavily censored, Gilead doesn’t like its citizens to have free access to stories - in fact, women are not allowed to read at all. Storytelling has the capacity to forge chains and to break them, to shape identities and make people cooperate. The importance of storytelling is a major theme in the novel. This sequel delivers the promised answers and closure. Margaret Atwood said one inspiration for The Testaments was the many questions from voracious fans. Stories tell us that monsters can be vanquished and freedom attained by those who persevere, retaining their humanity they reassure us that justice will prevail. Ambiguous endings fuel our imagination and can distinguish pessimists from optimists, though in hard times many of us look to stories for hope. She was getting into a car, and it was unclear whether the drivers were Eyes, members of the secret police coming to arrest her, or members of the Mayday resistance, set to free her. We last saw Offred at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. Agnes’s story, in particular, has the flavor of a Gothic Victorian novel. Each story is propulsive and distinct in voice. The other testimony comes from Aunt Lydia, the iron-fisted enforcer of the new ideology who retrains handmaids in the infamous Red Center. One is Agnes’s - better known to Hulu show fans as Hannah - who was snatched from her parents Offred and Luke and raised by the regime. One of these stories is Baby Nicole’s, who is now 16 years old and living in Canada, protected with a different name. The Testaments is told through three overlapping firsthand stories told by three women, which together explain a chain of events that occurred 15 years after Offred’s final scene. This sequel focuses less on violence and the perversity of society in Gilead, and more on daily life among the more privileged classes, as well as how experience and stories shape characters. In The Testaments, Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, the writer again projects the past into the future. Atwood might not be able to predict the future, but she can remind us of the old adage: “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” She described The Handmaid’s Tale as an “anti-prediction,” a template for what not to do. TIME AND TIME AGAIN, the author Margaret Atwood has reiterated that everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has a historical precedent.
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