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Chapter 32
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
Although Nicole never explicitly agrees to the plan, wanting time to think about it, everyone acts as if she has and she is swept into it anyway. Garth sets up a makeshift gym in the cubicles and starts training Nicole for several hours a day, both for building stamina and teaching her how to fight. As they train, Nicole learns that Garth was raised in the Republic of Texas, and his older brothers were killed in Texas’s war with Gilead. Garth teaches Nicole how to throw a “heartstopper punch” and how to gouge someone’s eyes out with her thumbs. Nicole is worried that this will hurt the other person, but Garth and Ada insist that she needs to know how to kill.
Although Nicole’s involvement in the plan serves a good and noble purpose, taking down an oppressive theocratic regime, her lack of choice in the matter echoes Agnes and Becka’s own lack of choice as women in Gilead, suggesting that the same error of disrespecting a woman’s personal agency can be committed even by those people who do not intentionally suppress woman. Garth’s mention of Texas’s war against Gilead suggests that not every state in the U.S. currently belongs to Gilead.
Themes
Ada teaches Nicole how to pray like they do in Gilead, though Nicole struggles to remember it all. They tell Nicole that she’ll pose as a street person with Garth, who will be there to watch out for her, posing as her boyfriend. Hopefully Nicole will get picked up by the Pearl Girls and taken into Gilead. It will be difficult, and they’ve sent operatives with Pearl Girls before with “mixed results,” but once Nicole is in Gilead, they believe the source will protect her.
Although the operatives refuse to say so explicitly, Mayday’s mixed results with infiltration efforts into Gilead suggest that they’ve had several operatives killed by Gilead authorities, meaning that they are knowingly sending Nicole into a very dangerous environment, raising the stakes around this mission which Nicole was not given the choice to opt out of.
Themes
Garth tells Nicole—she’ll go by Jade during the mission—that once they’re on the streets, she’ll need to be mature and follow his orders, which she’s been reluctant to do thus far. She’ll also need a tattoo— “God” and “love” arranged like a cross on her forearm. The source made this stipulation non-negotiable, perhaps as a way for the Pearl Girls to identify her. Nicole thinks this is hypocritical, since she was raised an atheist, but Ada insists that it’s necessary. One of Ada’s friends comes to do the tattoo, scarring it as well so it’s raised off her skin. They dye her hair pastel green and change her clothes yet again. The night before they leave, Nicole wonders if the source isn’t merely a decoy, and if she isn’t walking into a trap.
Although Nicole is 16, in her noted immaturity she often behaves much more childishly than Agnes and Becka did as 12-year-olds. This seems to suggest that growing up in such a repressive and difficult environment as Gilead prematurely ages girls like Becka and Agnes, since they are constantly forced to reckon with topics like death, forced marriage, and authoritarianism. Nicole, living in the relative freedom and safety of Canada for most of her life, was able to extend her childhood and childish behavior.
Themes
