116 pages • 3 hours read
The Testaments
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BetaPart 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Hymn”
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Ardua Hall Holograph”
Aunt Lydia prepares for bed, thinking about how thin her hair has become, and how she once preached to the other Aunts against the vanity of caring about hair. She sees that her health is diminishing and wonders how her life will end. She suspects one of her enemies will kill her. Aunt Lydia is a figure of authority, a bogeyman, a model of pious behavior, but she wishes she could be ordinary again.
It is the Spring Equinox and Aunt Lydia leads the dinner prayer, blessing all in Gilead, as well as Baby Nicole, who was stolen by her Handmaid mother and spirited away to Canada, where she represents all the innocents doomed to be raised by the depraved. They pray that Baby Nicole will return to them. Aunt Lydia explains in her memoir how the story of Baby Nicole is a useful tool to inspire hatred of Gilead’s enemies. Nicole also reminds them of the treachery of Handmaids.
During dinner, Aunt Lydia watches her fellow senior Aunts: Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Helena, and Aunt Vidala, wondering about what schemes they are planning. Afterwards, she walks to the Hildegard Library. She passes to the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives where the senior Aunts keep track of who is related to whom to prevent incest due to the Handmaid system. Finally, Aunt Lydia enters the Forbidden World Literature, her inner sanctum. In addition to forbidden titles, she keeps her own files on the secret history of Gilead. There, she keeps her secret manuscript inside a hollowed-out book, Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: A Defence of One’s Life. She had once been a family court judge before her arrest and subsequent transformation into Aunt Lydia.
Part 3 Analysis
Aunt Lydia feels no ambiguity about her reputation in Gilead. She knows that she is just as likely to die violently, as many of the founders of Gilead have, as she is to die of old age: "Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers?” (31). Aunt Lydia knows that creating her persona was necessary, but she takes no pleasure in being an icon and mourns her life as an ordinary woman.
Aunt Lydia looks forward to revenge. She knows that she will eventually fall, so she is ensuring that the right people fall with her; being behind the scenes of an empire offers a particularly edifying view of the empire builders, and with an empire as dependent on the appearance of faith, information is a valuable commodity. Aunt Lydia knows where the bodies are buried, sometimes literally, and she believes that documenting that information will be her legacy. Aunt Lydia reveals her reasons for writing a memoir: to record how she transformed from Lydia, family court judge, to Aunt Lydia.
In her previous existence as a virtuous, modern American professional woman, she had never anticipated having to defend her own life. “Though I realized how very wrong I had been about this, and about many other things, on the day I was arrested” (36). This last sentence of the chapter is revelatory, for it shows that Aunt Lydia did not join in the fanaticism of Gilead initially but that someone arrested her after the coup.
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By Margaret Atwood
