This hopefulness borne of innocence gives them power for the battles to come. Daisy lives in Canada with people she assumes are her parents, though things don’t add up. She navigates the confines of her daily life with no awareness of what the world was like before the regime. In “The Testaments,” Atwood builds on the testimonies of three women: Aunt Lydia, a prominent figure in the earlier book, as well as two teenagers, Agnes and Daisy.Īgnes lives in Gilead. The challenge facing the country is a precipitous drop in fertility, a consequence of the environmental pollution. To maintain this structure, women are relegated to limited roles such as Commanders’ Wives Marthas, who tend to the children and households Aunts, women who run things in “the women’s sphere” and Handmaids, who are essential because of their capacity to reproduce. If the first book was so prescient, dare we ask what is in the second?Ī quick recap: Gilead is a theocracy that emerged after the collapse of the democratic government formerly known as America. Few would have imagined that the fantasy could emerge as reality – the challenges to women’s rights, the disregard for democratic institutions, the weaponization of religion in the name of political ambition. Released in 1985, “The Handmaid’s Tale” was described as “a dystopian fantasy,” something that could never happen. Where “The Handmaid’s Tale” explored the rivalries among the oppressed women, the sequel examines the effect of internalizing the priorities of the oppressors.
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