‘The Testaments’ and the Tyranny of Tenderness » PopMatters

This is where the genius of Atwood’s Gilead lies. It builds itself not by terrifying, but by endearing. Once power beings to look as innocent as a dollhouse, as warm as a mother’s bedtime tenderness, you no longer notice that you are obeying, because obedience arrives not like an order, but like a home. Gilead did not attain its most perfect form through violence; it did so when it became invisible. The shortest path to invisibility is a child’s dollhouse.

The Testaments, Bruce Miller’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel and Hulu’s continuation of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-25), tells the story not of a regime’s founding but of its unraveling. The two series represent the two faces of power that Atwood wrestles with. The Handmaid’s Tale shows violence: whipped bodies, hanged corpses, the open force June (Elisabeth Moss) feels in every scene. There, power is visible, bloody, external — and precisely because it is visible, it can be resisted.

The Testaments takes us behind the scenes of authoritarianism. We no longer see the violence of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the gears turning beneath it: how the regime copies itself onto the next generation, how the cogs work in silence. June shows us the system’s face; her daughter, Agnes (Chase Infiniti), shows us its interior. In that room, there are no whips, no executions; only a dollhouse, a purple dress, and the nighttime tenderness of the Marthas. The first series tells of the regime’s brute force, the second of its soft force. The truly frightening thing is this: the second method of control is more effective. Force is visible and summons resistance; tenderness, however, is invisible and produces submission.

On the surface, everything is innocent. The Testaments looks like the story of young girls being prepared for marriage: an elegant school, kind Aunts, prayer, embroidery, fittings for wedding gowns. Beneath this elegance, however, are the machinations of a cold bureaucracy. The girls are not students but resources in a world where birth rates have collapsed. These are “subjects” whose health is measured, whose bodies are catalogued, whose futures are written for them. The school is not a preparation but a sorting facility. The most elegant room in that facility is Agnes’s.

Seeing Shades of Red

In the opening sequence, horses appear first. In the mist, unbridled, refusing to fit the frame. Then the mansion: symmetrical gardens, an immaculate entrance, an order measured down to every corner. The architecture itself is a statement. The camera drifts from the free toward the calculated in a single powerful dive. Without stopping, it enters the mansion, flows through it, and passes through the window of a dollhouse.

At the end of this unbroken dive is a girl who will tell us everything. Notice: the camera does not reach her face head-on; it arrives by passing through that small world first. Agnes is not in front of the dollhouse; she is inside it. The dollhouse is her very self: a life shrunk down, its rights taken away, deprived of the ability to measure time, turned into one of the regime’s cogs.

Recall how The Handmaid’s Tale opened: a desperate flight through the streets, sirens, a car chase, a child pulled from her mother’s arms, a gunshot off-screen. There, the regime announced itself with motion and force. Here it announces itself with stillness and symmetry; a tracking shot that glides rather than chases. The same power that once seized June in flight now arrives, in her daughter’s house, as architecture. Violence had to break in; tenderness was already inside, waiting at the window of a dollhouse.

Gilead here is not a place but an organism. It breathes, reproduces itself every morning, and seeps into every corner. The mansion is its body, the dollhouse a small copy of that body, the girl the blood pumping within. Blood does not know the vein. She does not see that she is part of this living thing; she does not realize that the hand keeping it alive is her own. Agnes stands before the dollhouse and explains her world to us.

“Do you want to know what it was like for me, growing up in Gilead?” she says. Then she adds: “I’m ashamed to admit that I once believed in it.”

That sentence sums up her entire world in a single stroke. She did not believe because she was forced to — she believed because she had no other choice. She did not even know there was another world. The deepest form of evil is not the one that obeys an order: it is the one that does not even know an order exists. The moment to stop and think is never an option. The regime’s invisible arm wrapped itself around her, and she did not know it.

Every utopia eventually produces its own dystopia. Gilead does the same. The Testaments tells not of the founding of that dystopia but of its collapse, though that collapse has not yet reached this room. The girl does not know what lies in her genes or who her mother is.

This is the line the two series draw between mother and daughter. June never believed; she remembered a world before Gilead, and that memory was itself a form of resistance. The regime had to beat against her knowledge daily, yet it could not erase it. Agnes has no such memory to defend. The Handmaid’s Tale is the drama of someone who knows she is unfree and refuses it; The Testaments is the quieter horror of someone who does not know she is unfree and therefore has nothing to refuse. Visible power makes rebels by being felt. Invisible power makes believers by never being felt at all.

Agnes opens a drawer. Inside, six figures: a Commander in a black suit, a Wife in blue, a purple Aunt-in-training, a pink girl, a grey Martha, and at the very end, a red slot. Empty. Only a shadow fills the space.

The Handmaids are gone from this house. The only empty slot is the red one. Throughout history, red has been the color of two things: the throne and the uprising. Julius Caesar painted his face red, returning in triumph; cardinals draped themselves in red robes; kings wrapped themselves in red for their portraits. The same red also flies on the flag of the crowds pouring into the streets of France, a place of refuge in The Handmaid’s Tale. Red rebels and subdues.

Gilead imposes red as a mark; you are here, you are seen, you cannot escape. It is a color that cannot be camouflaged, the one that the system always catches. Every uniform carries the danger of turning the one who wears it into an army. That is why the regime removed red from this house, but could not erase it. Its shadow remains: as memory, as warning, as fear. Six slots, six colors, six fates. The girl plays with these figures, but by the rules of her own world.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, red fills the screen. Ranks of handmaids dressed in red mass like a wound the regime could not stop showing. That visibility was its weakness: a crowd in identical red is already half an army, and the creators knew it, turning the uniform into the image of revolt. The Testaments keeps red off the screen entirely and, by its absence, gains a deeper control. What you cannot see, you cannot rally behind. The earlier series made resistance visible to dramatize it; this one makes it disappear to prevent it. An empty slot governs better than a full one.

When Agnes arranges the dollhouse, she is emulating the thing that arranges her. Her play, and her plaything, look innocent; a harmless toy for a child. Yet to impose and maintain its authority, every Order first simplifies: it reduces complex lives to numbers, people to roles, bodies to colors. What cannot be seen cannot be governed; so everything must first be made visible. The dollhouse is a miniature of that visibility, a world Gilead has ordered into six colors, six slots, six fates. Who stands where, who serves whom, and which room belongs to whom are all marked by color.

The child thinks she is playing. However, she is memorizing a map. Play is the way the organism copies itself onto the next generation. The greatest toy is the one that turns the player into its own toy. This is Gilead’s most durable feature: those who maintain the status quo – through innocence or ignorance – do not realize their roles in their own oppression.

The purple dress arrives at her room. Agnes puts it on. In the mirror, her reflection is multiplied three times — a different face from every angle, but all the same. On the surface, she wears a single expression; but beneath, she embodies three states at once: one suffering, one submitting, one still searching for a way out. None of these things are her choice.

“I was a plum,” she says. “I hadn’t gotten my period yet.”

Color, fabric, uniform; these are fates sealed onto the body in The Testaments. Purple is the color of those who have not yet menstruated, the mark of bodies that cannot yet serve Gilead. The girl is “in waiting”. The order has not yet fully defined her, but it will.

Yet purple, a color once reserved for emperors, kings, and the excessively wealthy, did not always signify such a high, or problemmatic, status. In Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, The Color Purple, purple is subverted to become the color of freedom, signifying a woman’s right to her own body and her own pleasure. There, purple signifies self-possession; here, it signifies one possessed. Gilead takes over the meaning of purple, too, but turns the color of Celie’s freedom in The Color Purple into a room where oppressed girls await their transition into oppressed women in The Testaments.

The Handmaid’s Tale wrote the regime’s claim on the body in hard, literal marks: the serial-numbered tag clamped to the ear like a tag on livestock, the womb spoken of as state property in plain, brutal terms. The Testaments writes the same claim in a child’s wardrobe. A plum-colored dress serves the purpose the tag once did, and does it more thoroughly, because the girl wears it as if it is her own taste in fashion rather than her sentence of servitude. The first series marked the body so that it would remember; the second dresses the body so that it will forget.

“I still had my dollhouse,” Agnes says. “It looked just like our real house.”

As she says this, her face blurs, and the dollhouse comes into focus. The calendar as a source for organizing one’s life is gone. Reading, as a source for expanding one’s understanding, is gone. Choice is gone. Time is gone. The small world within the doll house remains; the regime had not taken it, had considered it harmless. Agnes begins to measure time by play. It even has a Wife’s parlor and an attic where the Marthas, the domestic workers, not used for breeding, sleep.

That room is at the very center of Gilead and yet outside it. It’s the gap within the structure. The dollhouse is there. The hidden drawer is there. The corner by the window, where forbidden objects found in the outside world are concealed, is still in Agnes’s room. The Order arranged every place for Agnes, but somehow missed this corner. Or did not miss it, and simply had not noticed yet.

When Love Blinds and Binds

In the kitchen, the Marthas give Agnes food. They laugh together. “At night they used to let the little girl sit with them,” she narrates. Gilead produces these moments, too. This is a life designed not only by fear, but also by love. Not only prohibition, but warmth. Its strongest weapon is never violence; it’s making compliance feel like home. A regime that can make its restrictive bonds feel like a gift has already won. The Marthas enforce this, however unwittingly: Agnes remembers her time with them as a time of love, yet that love, too, is part of the house, just like the walls and the locks on the doors and windows. The tightest bond is the one woven from love, because no one wants to escape it.

Here, the two series stand at their farthest distance from one another. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the kitchen is a place of surveillance and dread; a Martha could be an informer, a wrong word could be fatal, and warmth is a risk no one could afford. In The Testaments, the same kitchen becomes a refuge, and that is the more efficient design. The earlier regime keeps order through the fear of being watched; this one keeps order through the comfort of being cared for.

Fear must be maintained against constant resistance; affection maintains itself, because no one struggles to escape a place that feels like love. What violence could only enforce, tenderness makes the child a willing submissive.

However, Agnes does not love her stepmother, Paula (Amy Seimetz). She knows she cannot say this, so she says it while playing with the dollhouse. She locks the Wife figure in the attic, and it becomes animated, pounding on the door, screaming. The little doll-girl that is Agnes does not flinch.

“It wasn’t a very nice thing to do,” she says. She tells this story, anyway. The attic in her dollhouse is her only space where she wields some power over her life, even if it is only her imagined life. What she cannot do in real life, she does here. The regime has taken everything — the calendar, reading, choice, time – but the dollhouse remains. There, Agnes makes the rules.

The Testaments‘ Agnes is the daughter of The Handmaid’s Tale‘s June Osborne. The daughter of the woman who fought Gilead, the child of its greatest resister, yet she is unaware of her mother’s resistance. What keeps a regime standing is its quiet removal of the mechanisms that turn people into political subjects. This girl, carrying the blood of the greatest resistance, could reach nothing that might have made her a citizen: not a question, not a choice, not even the knowledge of her mother, who knew of a different and better world. Passivity is not a flaw but woven within the design itself. The regime wraps itself around Agnes so completely that she lives in perfect obedience. However, the hand that locks the Wife figure in the attic is, without knowing it, carrying an inheritance. Not a rebellion. A spark.

The Testaments does not tell us a story of rebellion. It tells us how compliance is produced and how, within that production, somewhere invisible, the seed of resistance lies waiting. Agnes believes in Gilead. Then she does not. The distance between the two understandings of her world is not a space for revolution. It is but a crack.

It is here that Daisy (Lucy Halliday) arrives from somewhere outside, beyond Gilead’s borders. This is the thing the system cannot account for: the one who grows up inside cannot see, but the one who comes from outside sees clearly. Daisy brings with her a question that has never occurred to Agnes: “Why?” The girl raised inside could not ask it, because she did not know there was anything to ask. The crack first appears in this meeting between the two girls.

Until Daisy’s arrival in Agnes’s life, the regime ran flawlessly. The crack that broke it begins inside Agnes’s imagination, but the spark that lights the fissures comes from Daisy’s knowledge. Daisy, like Prometheus, carries the forbidden. She brings the proverbial fire, but Agnes has the fuel in her DNA. Resistance is not her choice; it is her inheritance.

The two series complete a single argument. The Handmaid’s Tale shows a power that has to be seen and obeyed, and is therefore always one uprising away from collapse. The Testaments shows a power that is obeyed but is never seen. It will be brought down by a girl who loved her dollhouse but learned, with Daisy’s help, that to no longer love her oppressor, she could begin to see clearly, and see so much more.