Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Testaments’ Is Done With Handmaids

This piece contains minor spoilers for the novel but does not reveal major plot points.

In June, Kylie Jenner threw a birthday party themed around her friend’s favorite TV show. The Kardashian and her pals pouted and posed on Instagram Stories in sexy red capes, cloaks, full makeup, and white bonnets.

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This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

There were, of course, think pieces and takedowns. Jenner and co were trying to imprint a new, fundamentally different meaning—Little Red Riding Hood meets party girl—onto the iconic costume from The Handmaid’s Tale. But that’s just not going to happen at this stage and Margaret Atwood, the author of the classic 1985 dystopia, knows it.

French and Saunders have done it, Funny or Die has done it. SNL did it twice, once with Amy Schumer, and the Hulu show that inspired Jenner’s party has been renewed for a fourth season. But the most visible use of the Handmaids costume, since sales of the book starting going up again after 2016, has been as an international uniform and symbol for women protesting anti-abortion and regressive reproductive rights laws from Alabama to Ireland.

It’s a powerful visual, both culturally and politically, but one striking image can’t sustain a 400-plus-page narrative about a totalitarian regime. Half the world has been clamoring for more Atwood, but specifically for more Handmaids—something to cut through as an icon or a parable, anything to shine a light on 2019 or act as a clarion call with Handmaids getting justice or, better, vengeance.

Atwood has granted us a sequel, The Testaments, which returns to Gilead, formerly the United States, where women’s bodies are the property of the state, fertile women are forced to live as Handmaids and endure rape in order to produce children, and society is divided into various classes which oppress and are oppressed by each other. But this tale is not actually about Handmaids.

It would have been easy for Atwood to revisit the red cloaks and build on the memes, but instead she focuses on women who are serving Gilead’s interests in different ways. Handmaids are never far from the minds and stories of the three narrators in The Testaments, which include Agnes Jemima, who comes of age in Gilead, and Daisy, who looks on in horror from Canada. That said, Atwood is far more concerned with the lives of Aunts (women who supervise, among other things, Handmaids’ training), Supplicants (Aunts-in-training), Wives (the privileged spouses of Gilead’s ruling class of Commanders), and the children of Handmaids, who are raised by Commanders and their Wives.

Through their narrow viewpoint, we return to the homes and schools of Gilead, which is at war—possibly on multiple fronts—15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. Each character’s tale overlaps in some ways with Offred’s tapes (ie, the events of the original book) but also offers fresh perspectives on familiar rituals, and new concoctions like Rubies Premarital Preparatory school for teen Wives-to-be, and the Pearl Girls missionary program. Handmaid plotlines in The Testaments are there mostly to propel our new heroines’ emotional and intellectual journeys.

It’s a shrewd move that allows Atwood to return to themes of subjugation, sexual crimes, and sisterhood without getting boxed in by her original protagonist Offred, the Handmaids, and all the protests and parodies stored within those red robes and white bonnets. Nothing Atwood could write could give that image more power than it already has; it’s complete.

None of Atwood’s new color- and costume-coded social classes are likely to make a similar leap to internationally recognized meme. The “spring green” palette of the teenage brides-to-be is affecting but ambiguous. Will we see middle-aged, morally conflicted, childfree women dressing in the drab, brown robes of the Aunts to make some sort of feminist statement? I doubt it.

The news is very much out there that none other than Aunt Lydia, Gilead’s most terrifying enforcer (in the “women’s sphere” of fertility and domesticity at least), is one of the three narrators. It’s a decision that’s the reverse of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s “first draft” of To Kill A Mockingbird, which stars an alternate, overtly racist Atticus Finch.

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There’s no rewriting her own literary history here from Atwood, though, simply a detailed appeal, concerning a character widely regarded as monstrous, to consider her origin story and the system and principles within which she has been operating all these years. It’s the kind of setting straight we saw in Atwood’s 2005 mythological retelling The Penelopiad.

This is one of the ways in which Atwood reconfigures the classifications that the original set out: Virgin Mary blue for Wives, memeable Mary Magdalene red for Handmaids, green for Marthas, brown for Aunts, etc. Perhaps because the regime is close to falling apart, these groups are less rigid, everyone’s place in Gilead society seems less certain, including the powerful Commander Judd, who was part of the initial Sons of Jacob coup and sits on the Council. This fluidity, this having some choice in the matter, may also have been required to get the plot where it needed to go.

Still, it’s intriguing to see who is classified, how they’re classified and who doesn’t get a look in. Marthas (Gilead’s female domestic servant class) still don’t get much of a narrative in The Testaments, though that’s not a surprise, and an Angel (male guard) jokes that there’s two types of women “sluts” and “ugly ones”. It’s difficult not to think of the incel community’s divvying up of men and women into ‘muscular, popular’ Chads, ‘attractive’ Stacys and ‘average looking’ Beckys.

Atwood has said that part of the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale came from reading canonical stories about utopias and dystopias which featured exclusively male protagonists and “decorative” women who often weren’t wearing many clothes. Again, The Testaments doesn’t go down the route of overly feisty, rebellious Handmaids to overcompensate. It opens with the dry description of a statue by the woman it was made to honor: “Already I am petrified.” Women can be “precious flowers” or pearls but they’re also told stories about witches.

In a similar way, though discussions of bodies, bodily fluids, and women’s duty to deal with them are real and present—“that thick red knowledge”—Atwood clearly didn’t feel obliged to do too much of a Part Two on pregnancy, perhaps because other writers such as Megan Hunter, with The End We Start From, and Louise Erdrich, with Future Home of the Living God, have recently taken on pregnancy and dystopia.

The Handmaid’s Tale’s coda The Twelfth Symposium ends with the line ”Are there any questions?” and, according to Atwood in the acknowledgements of the sequel, the question that “came up repeatedly” from readers over the past 35 years was: How did Gilead fall?

Offred was mostly limited to minor but meaningful acts of rebellion in the 1985 book. And if there’s one overarching tonal difference it’s the frequency and scale at which the women of The Testaments actively question and disobey the rules. They have to, of course, as from the outset, this was always designed to be the account of disastrously extraordinary times for the Gilead project, whereas Offred’s story, we are led to believe, was being repeated in homes across the country.

With one sickeningly inevitable choice Atwood has made, The Testaments is even darker, but for most of the book these three particular narrators are shielded from the very, very worst of Gilead either through childhood innocence, some limited personal power, or the actions of other women. As such, none have quite the raw intensity of Offred’s shock journey from regular American woman to Handmaid concubine in a sinister theocracy, though one of the strands does pose juicy questions around survival, complicity, and manipulation when all the choices around you are bad.

There is a lot of plot, more than you’ll expect, and TV showrunners will eat this up, especially the sections with serious YA appeal which will undoubtedly turn off some readers. The espionage thriller storyline of The Testaments is more intimate and plausible, within the constraints of Atwood’s original, chilling conception, than where the Hulu show has already found itself. In the show, things take a more “revolutionary” turn, to use the Season 3 trailer’s words, with the finale seeing Elizabeth Moss’ Offred running through the woods in her red Handmaid’s cloak to distract guards and help dozens of children and women make an airplane getaway to Canada. (To be fair to Hulu, a 1990 movie adaptation, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, saw Natasha Richardson’s Offred actually kill her Commander.)

A similar narrative arc might have been tempting for Atwood: to transform the Handmaid from victim to fully realized, regime-fighting rebel, ripping off her coned hat at some opportune moment. But The Testaments is all the better for choosing other, quieter forms of resistance for women under Gilead’s rule, and this helps it to stand apart. There are moments of touching solidarity and sacrifice throughout, but Atwood isn’t writing fanfiction of her own dystopian novel. The sequel is able to buoy you as a reader in a way The Handmaid’s Tale had no interest in doing, but sit with it and it’s still slippery and at times satisfyingly unsatisfying. This is an intriguing book from a woman who knows she can do bleak any day of the week.

The Testaments, unsurprisingly for its name, is full of biblical stories, fables and allusions to real world politics—the Aunts eat in the Schlafly café, a nod to conservative anti-abortion lawyer Phyllis Schlafly—and Atwood has lots to say, or ask, not only about shame, self-control tactics and surveillance but also about handbags, hair and nail polish, the latter of which we’re told always returns in the end.

All our heroines have the agency to, at some moment or other, look at themselves in the mirror and reflect on what they see and whether they recognize themselves. There is a suggestion that once we relax out of the innocence of childhood there’s an internal Aunt Lydia to reckon with and in the Vasily Grossman quote featured at the beginning of the book, the “face we hate” is in fact a mirror. Turn that into a meme.

The Testaments is published on September 10.

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

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