Reading Margaret Atwood is an unsettling pleasure, and seeing her stories brought to television is a privilege. Months after the finale of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments arrives on Hulu, set in Gilead fifteen years after the events that shaped June Osborne’s life. In this way, the world created by Atwood continues to accompany us through turbulent times, reminding us that dissent makes us human. As June used to say, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Like the novel The Testaments, the television adaptation is told through three voices. First, there is Aunt Lydia, a character known for the power she wields over the most vulnerable women in Gilead. The other two voices belong to young women who will become new figures of resistance: Agnes, raised within the structure of Gilead, and Daisy, a girl who grew up in Canada and chooses to enter Gilead through a new program aimed at women of childbearing age.
With them, The Testaments offers a new perspective on Gilead. What is it like to grow up in such a twisted world? How can a young woman build her own identity in an environment designed for everyone to think the same way? What needs to happen for these young people to wake up and see reality as they come of age? Living in a bubble makes it especially difficult to break out of it.
Regardless of these shifts, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale continues to center women. Girls who grow up into young women dream of the only thing they are allowed to want: marriage. All girls aspire to a good marriage in Gilead because such matches mean survival.
Gilead trains its girls to become perfect wives in perfect households, where their only authority is over the Marthas. At the same time, these wives-in-training carry an underlying fear of what the future holds for them as they reach adulthood. Without agency, education, or freedom, these young women move from being the cherished daughters of their Commander fathers to becoming abused, silenced, and diminished women.
The sequel exposes how extreme actions become normalized when they are systematically embedded in society – how rules are followed without question and hypocrisy thrives. This is a society that punishes desire in women and low-authority men, while upholding the most repulsive acts when Commanders do them as descendant from the word of God.
In this society, Daisy’s perspective in this first season mirrors our own as viewers. She is repulsed by the grotesque acts that most of the citizens of Gilead celebrate. And her experience forces us to ask what we ourselves are applauding in our own reality.
The Testaments also highlights the small triggers that can change everything: the spark of anger that drives us to act, the kind of friendship that becomes dangerous, and the love that allows us to see the world through a different lens.
Margaret Atwood’s stories are the kind that move us to tears, make us angry, and force us to confront a deeply disturbing side of human nature. When I read The Handmaid’s Tale a few years ago, I couldn’t help but see parallels with what is happening in many parts of the world. Over the course of its seasons, the series delved deeper into the world of these characters, leaving us breathless at times. The Testaments has left me with that same feeling, successfully bringing a powerful story from the page to the screen. I can’t wait to see how it continues to unfold in future seasons.
Those who were left disappointed by the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale (and made it clear on social media) would do well to give the sequel a chance. To understand why, we must accept that both stories move away from the typical Hollywood happy endings.
Instead, both series offer a dose of reality, showing how fights from different fronts can begin to crack the system’s foundations. This is not a one-person battle, nor a single-round fight. To fully appreciate both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, we must understand that they are not fairy tales, but rather ways to see into our own world of horrors and reflect on where our society stands.
