Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Bearing witness January 26, 2020

I have to admit that I was a little bit cynical when I discovered that Margaret Atwood had published a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. On the back of a successful TV series (and, more pointedly, a global political context in which the ideas explored in her original book were front and centre in the popular consciousness) which had renewed interest in her dystopian story, it felt like cashing in. Or, if not cashing in, perhaps an attempt to close the conversation by providing definitive answers to the ambiguous questions with which The Handmaid’s Tale novel closed.

Unfortunately, I have to say that I was proved right. The Testaments is an engaging and competently told story, which, were it an unrelated novel about resistance to a dystopian regime, or a piece of fanfic written in the world of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, I would find very good indeed. It weaves the stories of three women bound up in the struggle against Gilead and all it stands for, showing how their actions, independently and together, hasten the demise of its iniquitous regime. But the choice of which three women Atwood has chosen to illustrate this revolution is very telling: Aunt Lydia, the instigator of the entire programme responsible for codifying and implementing the legalised rape of women designated Handmaids, and the two daughters of June/Offred, the original novel’s narrator. Her older daugher, Hannah, is raised in ignorance of her origins to be the perfect Gilead Wife, while her younger, Nicole, has been spirited away in secret to Canada and raised in ignorance of her origins by people leading the anti-Gilead resistance movement. All three, ultimately, work against the regime, and the novel shows us clearly how their actions are enough to bring the dictatorship down.

And that, I think, is my first problem with The Testaments. The overthrow of Gilead feels too easy: it takes only a mere decade or so, and although Atwood is careful to show how the resistance is operating in secret under the very noses of the authorities, conducted in plain site through quiet moments of ‘women’s work’ that the men in power don’t notice, in the end the regime’s demise seems to have been mainly the result of the actions of three very heroic individuals. Atwood was very clear when writing The Handmaid’s Tale that all elements of the abusive situation in which women in Gilead found themselves were drawn from an amalgam of real-world precedents, including purely US American phenomena such as the fundamentalist, patriarchal Christian Quiverfull movement. These real-world injustices were (and are) deeply entrenched, and those that were overcome were done so only after the work of decades, centuries, and incalculable numbers of people. Ending Gilead in less than a decade felt unearned, unrealistic, and, to my mind, unjustifiably hopeful.

But by far the deeper problem with The Testaments is its ending of ambiguity. Atwood writes in an afterword that she wrote the novel in the main to provide answers to the many questions readers of The Handmaid’s Tale have asked her over the years. But it’s the ambiguous ending of The Handmaid’s Tale that is, in large part, responsible for that novel’s power: readers leave that book knowing that the regime ends, but not how, and not after how long. We’re left uncertain of its narrator’s fate, and even the identities of many of the people about whom she writes: the book is limited in space and time by design, the bounds of its world mirroring the experiences of the woman who gives voice to the way her own world has become narrowed and constricted. Did we really need to know that she escapes to join the resistance in Canada, or that Nick, the driver whose loyalties are uncertain, was working against Gilead from the beginning? Did we need to know that Aunt Lydia was always working to undermine the regime from within? The whole thing felt to me like an attempt to restore clarity to a story — and characters — whose strength had always been a kind of fuzzy uncertainty, more realistic to the way most people live with, and within injustice. People in The Handmaid’s Tale were not blazing, unafraid revolutionaries, or cartoonish villains (although of course many of them did horrifically terrible things) — mostly they were terrified, just trying to survive, or alternated between being sources of respite or violence for the people whose lives were in their hands. It was a quieter story that redefined what resistance looked like, which at once remorselessly condemned progressive North American women for being asleep at the wheel to the dangers posed by US Christian fundamentalism, assuming their rights would be safe and assured once it became somewhat socially acceptable for women to work in positions of authority, and spoke with compassion for people rendered powerless by oppressive, violent regimes, showing that sometimes mere survival is its own kind of heroism.

The Testaments does shine a light on the minds of women growing up immersed in a violent, patriarchal society, and there are some devastating moments, such as the acknowledgement that extreme patriarchy which renders all men as constantly beset by violent, lustful thoughts (and all women responsible for men’s behaviour) while keeping girls completely ignorant of sex for the sake of their ‘purity’ will result in nothing other than creating a generation of women so repulsed by and terrified of sex that they will refuse to the the one thing required of them: to marry and bear children. For the most part, however, it forgoes these quiet moments of connection with the terrifying, real-world effects of fundamentalist patriarchy for clear answers which readers shouldn’t need, undermining the devastating power of The Handmaid’s Tale itself. Sometimes, readers don’t need clarity: ambiguity is not just sufficient, but desirable.