Testifying Bodies: The Bible and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

Abstract

Abstract:In 2019, Margaret Atwood released The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Like the Christian Bible to which it makes frequent reference, the novel is assembled from multiple “testaments,” each offering different articulations of the relationship between body, memory, and truth. Additionally, Atwood’s Testaments foregrounds female bodies and female religious experiences, even as the novel borrows from and repurposes some of the Bible’s more troubling and misogynistic representations of gender, violence, and patriarchy. Engaging these themes, this article analyzes Atwood’s use of three key biblical passages: Judg 19 (the Levite’s concubine), Eccl 10:20, and Song 8:6. This close textual analysis is paired with reading the novel against the Bible as a literary and material whole. Persistently biblical and ambivalently feminist, The Testaments insists that there is no irrefutable affirmation of truth, and thus there is always need for more testaments.