The Testaments

Aunt Lydia narrates that sometimes she tells herself that she meant well as she constructed the women’s sphere of Gilead: “I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. Still, think how much worse it could have been if not for me” (111). Other times, she doesn’t believe herself. It is a rationalization that she tells herself, for the consequences she finds it hard to live with.

This chapter includes more descriptions of Aunt Lydia’s life in Ardua Hall. She balances her personal feelings of dislike and mistrust for her fellow Aunts, particularly her “old enemy” Aunt Vidala, with her need to maintain an outer appearance of goodwill and camaraderie. She is a master manipulator, capitalizing on the Aunts’ fears and prejudices, as well as their need to remain “useful” and relevant.

Aunt Helena, Aunt Elizabeth, and Aunt Vidala, her fellow “Founder Aunts,” devise a plan that they hope will help stem the tide of “emigration” from Gilead, meaning the escape of Handmaids and other dissidents to Canada. This is one of Gilead’s major public relations problems with the outside world. Escapees take with them stories, and sometimes even photographic evidence, of human rights violations. In addition, escaped Handmaids mean lost opportunities for more babies being born in Gilead, or even the loss of actual living babies. Therefore, the Aunts think that they can curry favor for themselves by addressing this ongoing problem.

Aunt Lydia takes control over the situation by promising the other Aunts that she will pass the plan along to Commander Judd, making sure that they know that she is the gatekeeper to the sphere of men’s power. When the plan proves successful, Aunt Lydia skillfully praises them while sowing distrust among them with reports of a mole in Gilead, who might even be among the Aunts in Ardua Hall. Throughout this exchange, Aunt Lydia is making it very clear to her fellow Aunts that she is the one in contact with Commander Judd, she is the one with access to information they do not have, and she is on the lookout for dissension and betrayal. These interactions are examples of her masterful skill at politics and psychological control.

The primary subject of this chapter, however, is the continuation of Lydia’s story of the early days of Gilead. The armed men gather a stadium full of professional women and subject them to fear and humiliation. The men are chipping away the normal lives of these women along with their dignity. They were all middle-aged, accomplished, with good haircuts. Lydia notes:

No handbags, though: we had not been allowed to bring those. So no combs, no lipsticks, no mirrors, no little packets of throat lozenges, no disposable tissues. It’s amazing how naked you feel without those things. Or felt, once (116).

This statement emphasizes the change between Lydia’s present and her past and the change that women underwent in society.

The initial shock has worn off for Lydia, and she has hours to sit in the unforgiving sun and reproach herself for not having seen this misogynistic revolution coming. She had felt protected by words, the Constitution, and “claptrap” from law school. She is seeing things through a more realistic lens now. She knows that in a coup, the new leadership always moves to crush the opposition, which is led by the educated, so it makes sense that she, as an educated woman, would be a target. However, Lydia was not born to privilege and knows that she must be scrappy, take advantages where she can find them, and figure out the angles. She is watching and waiting to see how she might yet save herself.

The situation becomes much more dire when 20 women are shot and protestors are smashed in the head with rifle butts; “We were to see but not speak: the message was clear” (118). Lydia wonders why they don’t just kill them.