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Chapter 46
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 first sees Jade at the Pearl Girls ceremony, and though she thinks Jade looks around in a manner “that verges on being too bold,” she does not think much of her otherwise. The next day holds the Particicution, which is an intense way for Jade to be introduced to Gilead. Agnes is not sad to see Dr. Grove killed, but Becka feels responsible and guilty for it since he was still her father, and they both know that Lydia overheard their conversation somehow. That is how Aunts operate, after all, by gathering and employing information.
Agnes’s realization that the Aunts do their work by gathering and weaponizing information, like Lydia does, again argues that knowledge is power, especially in the right hands, and can even grant power to women in spite of Gilead’s repressive, male-dominated hierarchy. In this manner, the power that knowledge can grant seems even more powerful than socially gifted power, since Lydia’s own influence is able to subvert even Grove’s superior position as a man.
Themes
After the Particicution, Agnes finds both Lydia and Jade outside her and Becka’s door. Lydia has assigned Jade to Becka and Agnes, to live with them and under their care. As Lydia and Jade step into their apartment, Agnes knows the peace they’ve known for the last nine years in Ardua Hall is now over. She reflects that she and Becka lack the particular ruthlessness of Lydia’s generation, those who had lives before Gilead.
Jade’s comparative immaturity, which reflects how much less suffering she has endured than Agnes and Becka, parallels Agnes and Becka’s comparative lack of ruthlessness that similarly reflects how much less they have suffered than Lydia and her generation of women, who endured the destruction of their past lives and the establishment of Gilead. Jade’s entrance into Becka and Agnes’s lives also marks a critical turning point for Becka and Agnes, as they will be brought into Lydia’s secrecy and plotting.
Themes
