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Chapter 38
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
Agnes opens the book and finds that it seems utterly harmless. There are lots of pages with black markings that resemble insects to her. Becka calls out from behind her, remarking that reading is hard at first but gets easier. They embrace, and Agnes tells Becka about the terrible man she almost married.
Again, Agnes’s surprise that a book is not full of some malicious power, but just letters on a page, suggests that she was raised to fear books as a method of keeping women as ignorant as possible, separate from any source of knowledge.
Themes
Becka explains that she has made it through her probation and become a Supplicant Aunt, and in nine years she’ll become a Pearl Girl. Probation is not so hard, she reassures Agnes, one only has to work hard and obey orders. Becka will see if they can live together. However, she warns Agnes to never speak ill of Lydia, even in private, since Lydia has ears everywhere and is terrifying. While Vidala wants girls to make mistakes, Lydia seems able to understand people and push them to be “better than you are.” Agnes thinks this sounds “inspirational.”
Once again, although Lydia is effectively both Becka and Agnes’s savior, as she apparently is for many other women, she is still a figure of fear and power. This suggests that Lydia’s reputation across Gilead and among the Aunts has achieved a nearly mythic, god-like quality that is both revered and feared, particularly in her ability to obtain information and hear things that were not meant to be heard.
Themes
