Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work

‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, at a time when young girls, carefully and modestly brought up to become wives to the regime’s male elite, are beginning to rebel; some would rather die than get married and there has been an attempted suicide via secateurs in the flower-arranging class. ‘Perhaps we need to change our educational curriculum,’ Aunt Lydia thinks, ‘less fear-mongering, fewer centaur-like ravishers and male genitalia bursting into flame. But if we were to put too much emphasis on the theoretical delights of sex, the result would almost certainly be curiosity and experimentation, followed by moral degeneracy and public stonings.’

Aunt Lydia wonders if the disturbed pupil might be schooled to view a penis as a means to an end, a prelude to having a baby? Or brainwashed out of her aversion through sleep deprivation and 20-hour prayer sessions? But no, the terrified girl believes she has ‘a calling to higher service’: she wants to become one of the celibate nun-like Aunts, she wants the privilege withheld from all other girls in the Republic of Gilead, the privilege of learning to read and write.

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Aunt Lydia is approximately as old as Margaret Atwood, who was born in 1939. She remembers the founding of Gilead in New England, the suspension of the US Constitution, the liquidation of Congress, the mass executions and the terror. Before the coup, she was a distinguished family court judge who had an abortion to prioritise her career, ‘a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination’. After Gilead was established to address the problem of the US’s declining birth rate, she was tortured, then recruited as a trusted enforcer of the new rules for girls and women.