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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Testaments, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religious Totalitarianism and Hypocrisy
Gender Roles
Truth, Knowledge, and Power
Shame, Fear, and Repression
Choice
Summary
Analysis
Agnes feels that she’s in a stupor for the rest of the day. In the afternoon, she pricks her finger while they are embroidering handkerchiefs and bleeds on her white cloth. Aunt Estée helps her bandage her finger and clean the blood out of the cloth, since that was one of the things women are good at, with their “soft” brains which are not like men’s “hard and focused” brains. Agnes imagines that her brain must be little more than “warmed-up mud.”
Agnes’s low view of her own mind and its capabilities demonstrates the manner in which such strictly enforced gender roles may lead individuals to make assumptions about themselves that are pernicious but entirely untrue. Agnes’s mind is no less capable than any other mind, and yet she automatically assumes that she is weak and stupid.
Themes
After school, Agnes questions Zilla about her mother, and Zilla is angry that Agnes’s friend told her but confirms that she was born by a Handmaid. However, Zilla remarks that if one’s mother is the person who loves them most, then Tabitha is still her rightful mother. Agnes asks what happened to her birthmother, if she escaped or was caught and killed. Zilla answers that no one knows, though even if they did catch her, she’s too valuable as a fertile woman to be killed. They would send her instead to the Leah and Rachel Center to be reconditioned by the Aunts, who are very good at “changing hearts and minds.” No one knows what happens in that place, but everyone knows that “sluts” become Handmaids there.
Although the story places great emphasis on biological motherhood throughout both Agnes and Daisy’s narrative, Zilla’s comment suggests that love may be as important an element in motherhood as biological relationship. In this view, both Tabitha and Melanie are real and valuable mothers, even if they themselves did not give birth. Zilla’s comment about the Leah and Rachel Center “changing hearts and minds” implies, in light of Gilead’s brutality, that women are tortured into becoming submissive Handmaids, which is particularly grim.
Themes
From that moment, Agnes is fascinated by Ofkyle, her father’s Handmaid. Although Agnes is not allowed to speak or interact with Ofkyle, Agnes finds herself secretly staring at her and wondering what her past life was like as a “slut,” what that even means, and if she’d exposed her body or worn men’s clothing. Looking at how subdued Ofkyle is now, she imagines that “she must have had a lot more energy” back then. She wonders if Ofkyle could be her birthmother and imagines how wonderful it would be for them to be reunited. She even sneaks into Ofkyle’s room to look for clues to her real identity but finds nothing. Meanwhile, her hatred for Paula grows, especially as her stepmother quietly purges every relic of Tabitha’s life from their house.
Although Agnes imagines Ofkyle’s past life as something wild and scandalous, what she describes is itself standard acceptable behavior in the modern world, demonstrating how such a confined and repressed existence can distort one’s viewpoint. Agnes’s feeling that Ofkyle must have been more energetic back then suggests that women are allowed to be far freer, more productive, and more themselves when they are not burdened by such weighty social expectations of modesty, chastity, and submissiveness.
Themes
