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Chapter 70
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
Lydia bids her final farewell to the reader. She wonders if the reader will cherish these pages or burn them. Hopefully, a historian will find them and share them with the world in an unflinching account of Lydia’s character, good and bad. She pictures her reader as a sharp young woman, poring over the pages until she despises Lydia, as historians and biographers often come to do with their subjects.
Lydia’s hope that her reader will be a bright young woman, a historian perhaps, speaks to her hope that women will regain the freedom in the future to pursue their professional lives and to use the full capacities of their minds to think, aspire, and impress, unhindered by Gilead’s conservative and restrictive gender roles.
Themes
As she writes her last words, Lydia can hear the boots coming down the hall. The Eyes are coming for her, no doubt. Her work is already complete. Though she will not see Gilead fall herself, the events are set in motion. She will hide her manuscript in a heretical Catholic text, where it is least likely to be found, and end herself with an injection of morphine. “In my end is my beginning.”
Lydia’s choice to kill herself rather than be captured echoes Becka’s own choice to do the same. The act signifies that Lydia wants to make one final assertion of her own personal agency now that her work is done, rather than be imprisoned and subjected to the will of men.
Themes
