The sequel to the critically-acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale is finally here! Thankfully, I did not have to wait 34 years since the first book was published to wait for this gem of a second.
The Testaments is essentially told in epistolatory form, much like its predecessor; it is set 15 years after the events of the conclusion of the first novel, and the atrocities of Gilead are told through the very differing experiences of three strong women interwoven in the fabric of the ruthless Gilead theocratic government. Also, like the first book, these holographs of the protagonists involved in the second book were preserved and dissected at a convention concerning Gilead history, ethics, and politics, that convenes every year or so, years and years in the future, as evidenced with futuristic names, and the trajectory of clinical conversation stenographed in the conference implies Gilead’s existence was but a short blimp in a long past.
The first book gave evidence to the downfall of Gilead, but The Testaments delivers on that reclamation of women agency, dignity, and choice as Gilead does fall as immediate consequence to the bravery of the women protagonists. Gilead’s puritan, totalitarian system, cherry-picks from the Bible to justify their human rights violations on women, and, typical of such a system in actual real-life history, enforces the idea that dissent to the government leaders is as treacherous and equal to dissent to God by systemic brainwashing in the education systems, and obviously re-writing history. I mean, the fact that the different “women roles” exist in the first place, such as Handmaids (their responsibility is to be but a vessel to bear children in lieu of Wives that cannot) and Marthas (for the cooking and the cleaning. Zzzz), already emphasizes how deep the religious and “moral” indoctrination is in society.
Christianity as a whole isn’t the scapegoat though, and Atwood makes that clear: any institutionalized religion with enough zealots and extremists will inadvertently abuse the system they created. Gender roles is also very prevalently common in the Gilead rhetoric of life, and I found myself taking more reading breaks than usual to absorb what could really be my very own dystopian future, living in the United States, the way it currently is.
The book also highlights how sexism is a social construct, as what the protagonists were told they could not do due to unfounded biological or sexist reasoning (for example, reading and learning the alphabets, lol), they could, and did well. The complete freedom represented at the conclusion of The Testaments was achieved through many ways, as per revolutions go, but most subtly and quietly of all, Gilead was broken by demolishing the simple idea that women, matter, less.
Knowledge, power, and truth, are the tools to utilize to truly engage in the prevalence of injustice so steeped in daily life, and this book demonstrates that it doesn’t just stop there, as all three protagonists, in their own way, gain enough information concerning the atrocities, to challenge it, and they did. The protagonists are very different from one another too, and each individual may not perceptibly fit the whitewashed, heteronormative idea of what feminism seems to be depicted as in the media, which is brilliant as it demonstrates the growing diversity of feminists, or, as I like to call them, regular people that aren’t sexists.
I enjoyed this read very much.
4/5
Yorumlar