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Chapter 17
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Testaments, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religious Totalitarianism and Hypocrisy
Gender Roles
Truth, Knowledge, and Power
Shame, Fear, and Repression
Choice
Summary
Analysis
Months pass and Ofkyle’s belly continues to swell. Agnes makes herself as invisible as possible but watches and listens. Commander Kyle seems unaffected by the pregnancy, but men are trained to be stoic. Other wives pay great attention to Paula now, and she often hosts dinner parties so that other women can come to dote on her and see her pregnant Handmaid. Watching through a crack in the door, Agnes sees that the women love Ofkyle’s pregnant belly but care nothing for the person attached to it. They regard it as Paula’s baby, not Ofkyle’s. Ofkyle herself does her best to keep her face like stone, though Agnes occasionally sees flashes of pain and wonders if she cries at night. The whole situation makes Agnes angry; Ofkyle’s baby will be taken from her just as she was taken from her own mother, even though Tabitha truly did love her.
Ofkyle is the only Handmaid seen throughout the entire story and functions to encapsulate the painful and dehumanizing position they occupy in society, which the first book centered on. Ofkyle is regarded by Paula and her friends only as a womb—her only value is in her ability to bear children, emphasized by the fact that they only show concern for her pregnant belly, not for Ofkyle herself. This narrow focus dehumanizes Ofkyle since it does not recognize her as a full human being with her own hopes and desires, and thus demonstrates the manner in which a narrow, gendered view of women that places all emphasis on motherhood can be similarly dehumanizing.
Themes
On the Birth Day, wives gather with Paula to wait and hear the news. Ofkyle is situated in the master bedroom so that the midwife Aunts and the Marthas can all be present to help, but unmarried girls like Agnes are forbidden from seeing a birth. She can hear Ofkyle’s heavy breathing and grunting, though, and wonders what torture is being inflicted on her. Suddenly, one of the Aunts runs out into the hallway calling for a doctor because Ofkyle is bleeding. A doctor arrives in his black car and runs into the room to operate. The baby is born, but Ofkyle dies. The Marthas pity Ofkyle’s death but insist that it was either her life or the baby’s life on the line. Agnes goes to bed.
The prohibition against young women witnessing a birth acts as yet another measure of control, since all women are expected to be mothers and yet they are not allowed to see what motherhood truly entails. This not only limits the knowledge of girls like Agnes, but also their power to choose, since they cannot witness the painful process of childbirth before experiencing it themselves. By setting up situations that suggest such concealment of knowledge or hiding of reality is wrong, the novel argues that honesty is the most moral path.
Themes
Later, Agnes sneaks up to Ofkyle’s room where they have left the body and pulls back the sheet to look at her face. Her eyes are open, staring, and her skin is completely white. Agnes kisses her forehead and remarks that she’ll never forget her. Years later, Agnes looks her up in the genealogical archives and finds that her real name was Crystal, and so this is how Agnes remembers her. The family holds a small funeral service for Ofkyle, and Aunt Lydia is present to make a speech. She remarks that Ofkyle made the ultimate sacrifice and demonstrated her nobility, though her voice shakes when she says this. Agnes thinks this is nonsense: the reality is that they cut Crystal’s body open and killed her. Nobody asked Crystal if she’d wanted to sacrifice herself. There was never any choice.
Ofkyle’s death and lack of choice in whether to sacrifice her own life to save the baby’s bears an obvious parallel to debates around abortion in the modern world. In Gilead, abortion is illegal and the only life that truly matters is the child’s, meaning that the mother has no choice over what happens to her body. This situation effectively parallels the situation a young mother would find herself in if she were caught in a dangerous pregnancy in a place where abortion is outlawed entirely, as some argue it should be. Agnes’s horror and sense of the injustice at automatically valuing the life of the baby over the life of the mother obviously condemns taking away a woman’s choice in such a matter.
Themes
