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Chapter 36
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
The days pass and Agnes grows “desperate.” She often contemplates methods of suicide or perhaps even trying to murder Commander Judd on their wedding night, but she knows that she lacks Becka’s resolve to follow through with any of them. At night, Agnes wishes that someone would come to rescue her, but it seems impossible.
Although Agnes is one of the three main characters and Becka occupies only a supporting role, Becka’s strength, resolve, and kindness make her arguably the most noble and heroic figure of any of them, exhibiting inner strength where Agnes exhibits only passivity.
Themes
Three days before the wedding, while Paula is out of the house, Aunt Lydia pays Agnes a surprise visit and tells Agnes that Becka is safe, living as an Aunt in Ardua Hall. She heavily implies to Agnes that she can take the same path but must approach Aunt Estée herself to claim her higher calling. Lydia will handle Commander Judd. After Lydia leaves and Paula returns, Agnes knows that Paula will lock her in her room if she suspects what is happening. Agnes asks if she may go speak to the wedding planners at Shunammite’s house—like Agnes, Shunammite is preparing for her own wedding. Paula gives Agnes permission, happy to have her out of the house, and sends her with a driver.
Once again, Lydia demonstrates that she not only passively protects women by letting them become Aunts to escape forced marriage, but actively undermines Gilead’s main social convention, proactively extending herself and thus risking her own power and reputation in order to rescue young women. Although Lydia was decidedly the villain of The Handmaid’s Tale, access to her inner narrative and schemes recasts Lydia in the reader’s mind as something of an anti-hero.
Themes
Agnes visits Shunammite and invents a reason to ask the wedding planners a benign question, then insists she needs to leave. However, she asks the driver to bring her by the school so she may thank Aunt Estée for her kindness over the years. The driver is hesitant to not follow Paula’s orders exactly, but Agnes reminds him that she’ll be a powerful wife soon and will see him rewarded, touching her hand to his as she does so. The driver begins to soften, so Agnes lifts her skirt to show a bit of her ankle as well, and the driver agrees. He takes her to the school and drops her off with the Angels who escort her inside, and Agnes tells him to wait for her.
The fact that Agnes’s showing a bit of ankle is enough to entice her driver and send a subliminally sexual message—even though an ankle is hardly an object of sexual allure in the modern world—suggests that conventions of modesty are socially constructed. In a society where women are strictly forbidden from exposing any part of their bodies, revealing the ankle from beneath a long skirt can seem as suggestive as a flash of nudity.
Themes
Agnes meets Aunt Estée inside and tells her about the horrible marriage and that she will either kill herself or cut Commander Judd’s throat. Aunt Estée understands, asking if she has received a higher calling. Agnes says that she has. Aunt Estée and Agnes both know that Agnes cannot return home since Paula would lock her away until the marriage, nor can she remain at the school, since the Eyes could come and claim her. Estée decides that she will take Agnes away with her. Estée informs the driver that Agnes will be going with her instead, and he is angry at being tricked, but under the watchful eye of Estée’s Angels he can do nothing. As Estée and Agnes drive away from the school in the Aunt’s car, Agnes cries, feeling hopeless. Estée assures her that if they “have faith,” things will work out.
Agnes’s flee to the Aunts, though prompted by Lydia, represents an exertion of her own agency and choice, particularly since she had to devise her own scheme to reach Aunt Estée. This is a critical development for Agnes’s character, marking one of the first times in her life she is able to make a significant decision for herself. It marks the beginning of her life as a woman with the power to choose, learn, and decide for herself, even if she does not realize it yet. The fact that Paula would lock Agnes away rather than let her make her own choice suggests that Paula opposes, even fears, Agnes obtaining any sense of personal agency.
Themes
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