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Chapter 61
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
Nicole worries to herself that she may have killed Aunt Vidala with the punch. The “O” on her forearm where Lydia inserted the microdot itches and doesn’t seem to be healing well. The car passes through several Angel checkpoints, but the driver, one of Lydia’s men, does all the talking and they get through without fuss. Agnes and Nicole are still terse with each other, but Nicole tries to make peace by saying she’s “glad to have a sister,” and Agnes agrees.
Nicole’s itching arm where the information cache was inserted hints that she will have trouble with it in the future. Meanwhile, the tension between Agnes and Nicole underscores how different they are and how different their lives have been, despite the fact that they are biological sisters.
Themes
The driver drops Agnes and Nicole off at a bus station in New Hampshire, and they board the bus with the tickets Lydia supplied them when it arrives. Although it is all lower-class people on the bus, they warmly salute Agnes and Nicole in their Pearl Girls uniforms, as do the Angels at the intermittent checkpoints. One of who tells them they’re “very brave, heading into Sodom.” The further north they get, the less friendly people gradually seem toward them, until they and their uniforms are met with plain scowls. Nicole realizes that Gilead’s support must be swiftly waning in the outer regions. They are both feeling anxious and jittery, but Nicole reminds Agnes to look serene.
The Angel’s description of the outside world as “Sodom” is a reference to the cities Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, which God destroyed for the cities’ apparent wickedness. The Angel’s use of such a word not only suggests that Gilead’s people are taught to see the rest of the world as morally bankrupt, but also demonstrates the manner in which religious stories and imagery can be used to uphold an authoritarian regime. However, the general derision that the Pearl Girl uniforms elicit from people farther into the rural countryside suggests that in the outlying territories, Gilead’s citizens openly despise the regime.
Themes
In the late afternoon Agnes and Nicole get off the bus in a shabby, broken little town. They enter an old convenience store and sit at the counter. The man behind it looks annoyed by their uniforms. However, when Agnes offers the two passwords, the man’s countenance changes and he shows them to a backroom where he has new clothes—jeans, plaid jackets, hats—and transportation waiting for them. He tells them to leave all of their old gear in their Pearl Girls backpacks, and he’ll dispose of them himself. With normal clothes on, Nicole starts to feel back in her element once again.
The change of clothes from Pearl Girl dresses to jeans and jackets denotes the transition from one world to another, and Nicole’s comfort at wearing modern clothing suggests that she feels at ease once more now that they are re-entering the modern, democratic world that she understands and leaving the strange world of Gilead behind, which demanded strict gender norm adherence and women’s submissiveness.
Themes
