My Atwood Project, Part 5: The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

I’ve read Atwood’s most famous novel several times. I can’t remember the first, but it made such an impression on me that I insisted on teaching it in a novel-reading elective at an Episcopalian school in the early 2000s. What better place? Show young people from religious families the unethical lengths to which religion can be pushed. Then I reread it at least once again, before the long-awaited sequel The Testaments came out, in 2019. 

I view The Handmaid’s Tale as a breakout for Atwood because of her world-building. The previous novels, set in contemporary times, focused on characters, primarily women, and their relationships, primarily to men. The cities fade into the background. Here, Handmaid Offred is a rat in a maze, so the maze becomes very important. Where are the exits? Where are the traps? This novel takes on an extra dimension as the new rules of the new society render the protagonist’s every interaction fraught. We see this world-building again most clearly in the speculative MaddAdam series, but also in her Booker Prize-winning Blind Assassin. In all of these, Atwood steps out of the genre of “women’s fiction” and incorporates the influence of the comic books and pulp novels she and her brother read as children. This hybridization makes these novels truly original. 

Another element that struck me this time through was the transactionality: in a society based on removal of choice, very little can be freely given, but there is a lot of trade. The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy, tells Offred from the outset that she views their relationship as a “business transaction.” Offred sees in small infractions of the rules the hopeful existence of a black market and opportunities for trade. When the Commander summons her for an off-the-script meeting, she immediately wonders both what he wants, and what she can get. This tit-for-tat mentality is strongly tied to the strict pecking order. Everyone’s status is obvious thanks to their prescribed clothing color, which reminded me of Brave New World. Seeing everyone’s value at a glance is also so helpful in maintaining order. 

[Spoilers! Beware!]

Another motif that I noticed was how haunted Offred is by the suicide of her predecessor, and how strongly her own will to live prevails, driving her to have an affair with chauffeur Nick despite the danger involved. 

I realized at the end that my perception of the book’s ending had been clouded by the 1990 movie adaptation, in which Offred kills the Commander before escaping to a trailer in parts unknown to record her memoir. The novel actually ends with Offred simply being picked up by a black van, for unclear reasons, urged on by her lover Nick, who assures her it’s safe. We can assume the van was operated by the Mayday resistance, as Nick said, not the all-seeing Eyes, because the next chapter takes the form of an academic conference examining the memoir which Offred must have written outside of Gilead. 

This frame story element returns in The Testaments, which consists of the confessions of Aunt Lydia, and of Offred’s two children, one liberated with her and raised in Canada, the other raised in Gilead. I’m deviating from the chronological aspect of my project here, because these two books came out over 30 years apart, but I could not resist reading them "in order” again. 

When I first read The Testaments, I was not thrilled with the idea that Aunt Lydia was a secret rebel. How could she have filled her role so convincingly, when she never truly believed? How could she lie so low, so long? It seemed like a cop out to redeem someone who seemed such a total villain.

This second time, though, I paid closer attention to Aunt Lydia’s backstory, as a judge, an ambitious single woman who was given the opportunity to pursue that ambition right to the top of a new society. She had the patience and cunning to wait to bring the whole of Gilead down, rather than ruin her chance too early in a weak, partial rebellion. I am more willing to buy into Aunt Lydia’s character now. 

And I am still convinced of the plausibility of Gilead. It is far too easy to imagine those with the “they’re gonna take our guns” mentality turning those guns on others. Atwood takes great pains at the end of The Testaments to show the archives of articles she collected in researching the first book: everything she wrote, including the crazed “Particicution,” was based in reality. Let it not become so.