Scan barcode
A review by nonetheless_she_read
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
5.0
Well, I guess now that I'm quarantined and, consequently unemployed, I may as well keep my hands busy.
I began reading The Testaments during the COVID-19 quarantine in Puerto Rico, where I am from. The book was a gift from a friend who shares my interest in feminist theory and the law. We're attracted to the Gilead series because it integrates those two interests into a compelling story. Moreover, I love dystopic fiction and the way that dystopian societies are built on analogies and symbolism to represent the values lost and promoted by civilization.
When I started reading, I had already seen the Hulu series based on the original book and finished the novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Reading this novel made me think of my reactions to The Handmaid's Tale. When I read the original novel, mostly because I had already seen a few episodes of the Hulu series, I felt a little cheated. Although I enjoyed the novel and recognized that the series contained a lot of the best quotes from the book, I found the novel a little flat. The novel gave me the same feeling as George Orwell's 1984. I felt this environment full of a somber sort of acceptance, melancholy, and yearning. The narration is meant to be a series of audiotapes, by an unidentified first-person narrator. The end, like 1984's is disheartening, there is no hope or escape. Because of that, the novel did not develop any of the characters in the way the series did. I kept wanting to know more about these characters that surrounded the narrator.
In The Testaments, Atwood uses a similar narration device, but she uses three first-person narrators: Nicole, Agnes and Aunt Lydia. Although it is the characters of Nicole and Agnes that move the story forward, I was most engrossed by Aunt Lydia's story. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia is the inside source that ignites the explosion that leads to Gilead's demise. They frame her character differently than in the series. In the Hulu series, Aunt Lydia's background is revealed as well. She was a teacher and a devoutly religious person, but she was insecure and prone to lash out. That made her perfect for the role that the Aunts appear to have in Gilead in the series. They teach and they discipline.
However, Atwood has different plans. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia's background is the law. She was a judge, family court mostly. She was a strong-willed woman, with no spiritual leanings that the reader can tell. She was chosen to be an Aunt, by Gilead leaders, because the Aunts had a more important task. The Aunts were tasked with creating, what could be seen as, a separate legal sphere for women. They were to create laws that would rule women's conduct and their roles in society. After all, the doings of women are not a man's concern and they shouldn't be kept from important matters on such trifles.
When she reflects on her role in Gilead, Aunt Lydia says:
"Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most traveled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them."
Aunt Lydia prides herself on having witted her way into surviving Gilead and even thriving in it. Throughout the novel she explains how she climbed the ladder of authority and kept her place, all the while collecting the secrets that would inevitably bring Gilead down. One of the reasons that I was so captivated by Aunt Lydia was actually her legal background.
I am a lawyer, or soon to be, and I am constantly fascinated by the law. I love to read about law, its history and the ways it interacts with the word. I also enjoy writing about law, having published to law review articles before graduating from law school and working on two different law review publications. However, in the last few years, in Puerto Rico, the ongoing crises have served to remind me that law is fiction and it only exists if people believe in it enough to follow it and enforce it. There was something about that in a book I read recently, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. As a professor of mine was fond of telling his History of Law students, lawyers are useless in a crisis. Once the apocalypse comes, no one will need us. I felt echoes of all those sentiments in Aunt Lydia's inner musings.
At one point she says:
"To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm."
I feel that way about myself often. I am so in love with the law that I find myself believing it can save us. But it can't. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the United States after a religious faction stages a coup and takes over the government. Both books and the series reference the subtle, albeit familiar ways, in which the faction takes over. They suspended the constitution claiming the state of emergency, they approved laws that no one had heard of to strip women of their right to own property, then they froze assets and closed borders.
I began reading The Testaments during the COVID-19 quarantine in Puerto Rico, where I am from. The book was a gift from a friend who shares my interest in feminist theory and the law. We're attracted to the Gilead series because it integrates those two interests into a compelling story. Moreover, I love dystopic fiction and the way that dystopian societies are built on analogies and symbolism to represent the values lost and promoted by civilization.
When I started reading, I had already seen the Hulu series based on the original book and finished the novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Reading this novel made me think of my reactions to The Handmaid's Tale. When I read the original novel, mostly because I had already seen a few episodes of the Hulu series, I felt a little cheated. Although I enjoyed the novel and recognized that the series contained a lot of the best quotes from the book, I found the novel a little flat. The novel gave me the same feeling as George Orwell's 1984. I felt this environment full of a somber sort of acceptance, melancholy, and yearning. The narration is meant to be a series of audiotapes, by an unidentified first-person narrator. The end, like 1984's is disheartening, there is no hope or escape. Because of that, the novel did not develop any of the characters in the way the series did. I kept wanting to know more about these characters that surrounded the narrator.
In The Testaments, Atwood uses a similar narration device, but she uses three first-person narrators: Nicole, Agnes and Aunt Lydia. Although it is the characters of Nicole and Agnes that move the story forward, I was most engrossed by Aunt Lydia's story. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia is the inside source that ignites the explosion that leads to Gilead's demise. They frame her character differently than in the series. In the Hulu series, Aunt Lydia's background is revealed as well. She was a teacher and a devoutly religious person, but she was insecure and prone to lash out. That made her perfect for the role that the Aunts appear to have in Gilead in the series. They teach and they discipline.
However, Atwood has different plans. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia's background is the law. She was a judge, family court mostly. She was a strong-willed woman, with no spiritual leanings that the reader can tell. She was chosen to be an Aunt, by Gilead leaders, because the Aunts had a more important task. The Aunts were tasked with creating, what could be seen as, a separate legal sphere for women. They were to create laws that would rule women's conduct and their roles in society. After all, the doings of women are not a man's concern and they shouldn't be kept from important matters on such trifles.
When she reflects on her role in Gilead, Aunt Lydia says:
"Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most traveled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them."
Aunt Lydia prides herself on having witted her way into surviving Gilead and even thriving in it. Throughout the novel she explains how she climbed the ladder of authority and kept her place, all the while collecting the secrets that would inevitably bring Gilead down. One of the reasons that I was so captivated by Aunt Lydia was actually her legal background.
I am a lawyer, or soon to be, and I am constantly fascinated by the law. I love to read about law, its history and the ways it interacts with the word. I also enjoy writing about law, having published to law review articles before graduating from law school and working on two different law review publications. However, in the last few years, in Puerto Rico, the ongoing crises have served to remind me that law is fiction and it only exists if people believe in it enough to follow it and enforce it. There was something about that in a book I read recently, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. As a professor of mine was fond of telling his History of Law students, lawyers are useless in a crisis. Once the apocalypse comes, no one will need us. I felt echoes of all those sentiments in Aunt Lydia's inner musings.
At one point she says:
"To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm."
I feel that way about myself often. I am so in love with the law that I find myself believing it can save us. But it can't. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the United States after a religious faction stages a coup and takes over the government. Both books and the series reference the subtle, albeit familiar ways, in which the faction takes over. They suspended the constitution claiming the state of emergency, they approved laws that no one had heard of to strip women of their right to own property, then they froze assets and closed borders.