Margaret Atwood on The Testaments and Trad Wives
Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Testaments
The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s six-season TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed 1985 novel, was an emblem of anti-Donald Trump resistance during his first presidential administration. As for what its sequel series, The Testaments, loosely based on Atwood’s 2019 best-seller of the same name, will represent for audiences during Trump’s second term, “that’s not up to me,” the 86-year-old author tells TIME. “Readers and viewers will make up their own minds about what it represents.”
The Testaments, now streaming on Hulu, picks up in the Republic of Gilead four years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale’s 2025 finale in which titular handmaid June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) is liberated from the totalitarian theocracy that forced her into sexual servitude for infertile couples, but vows to keep fighting for those still left behind, including her teenage daughter, Hannah, now known as Agnes MacKenzie after being adopted by a prominent Gilead commander a decade earlier.
The Testaments TV show puts a YA spin on the young women’s sphere of this hyperpatriarchal society, following the wide-eyed Agnes (One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti) as she navigates high school, burgeoning hormones, and arranged marriages alongside her friends, which include recent Gilead transplant Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a vengeful Canadian teen with ties to June.
At its core, the speculative series is about “somebody on the inside deciding they’re going to take it down,” says Atwood. That somebody is Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), who, as the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale revealed, has gone from hard-nosed enforcer for the government to secret operative for the resistance.
Below, Atwood discusses the show's themes of rebellion and what it says about trad wives.
TIME: You’ve said you wrote The Testaments to show what happens when a totalitarian regime collapses from within. What can the book, and now the TV show, teach us about orga nized rebellion?
Atwood: There is a lot of literature on resistance movements and people who are active in them. One of the big stories of the 20th century—and it’s probably going to be one of the big stories of the 21st century—is double agents or people working from within to bring down a corrupt regime. That’s Aunt Lydia, that’s what she became.
One episode tells the story of how Lydia became the most powerful Aunt-turned-mole in Gilead. Do you consider her an anti-hero or a vil lain?
Oh, “this is good.” “That’s bad.” It’s rarely completely true. Most of us live in that in-between area. It’s also true that the good that people think they’re doing can have very adverse effects.
The story is focused on the girls being groomed to become the wives of Gilead’s most important men. They’re being taught how to look prim and proper while pouring the perfect cup of tea. Are you familiar with the online subculture of trad wives?
Oh yeah. But when you say “trad wife,” you’re not talking about women in the 19th century. If you were a farmer, you had to have a wife. You could not run that thing without somebody doing the cooking, gardening, keeping the chickens, the quilting. These were fairly marginal operations. You needed somebody who knew how to use up every leftover, repurpose any form of cloth. That’s very far from what people thinking that they are trad wives now are doing.
How would you describe what they’re doing now?
Well, it’s a little bit like Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid. It’s not really a milkmaid. Although trad wives do a certain amount of this and that, they’re by no means a 19th century runner of a household. Most trad wives exist in families with a reason able amount of money. Otherwise, they would not be able to afford to do this.
The message of The Testaments is “there’s nothing more power ful than a teenage girl.” But most women don’t truly understand the power they had then until they get older. Is there something you learned later in life that you wish you had known when you were a teenager?
I don’t know. A lot of the things I did, a sensible person wouldn’t have done. Deciding I was going to be a writer at the age of 16, I mean, that’s not an adult thing. Especially in Canada at a time where there were no visible writers. So where did that come from? I think ignorance is often your friend because if I had known how difficult it could be and what the chances were, I probably wouldn’t have done it.
Maybe ignorance really can be bliss.
It can be. Willful ignorance is different from just not knowing stuff. A lot of adolescence is that. You’re trying things out to see if they work. It is not true that you can be anything you want to be. That’s just not true. I could never have been a ballet dancer. I got dizzy on the turns.
What is the best part about being in your 80s?
Friends and family. One good piece of advice: make younger friends because a lot of your older friends are going to die. They are not going to be with you. If you don’t make younger friends, you’re going to be pretty much alone.