REVISITING GILEAD UNDER A DECOLONIZING PERSPECTIVE:
FEMALE EMPOWERMENT AND RESIGNIFICATION OF CANADIAN IDENTITY IN THE TESTAMENTS, BY MARGARET ATWOOD
Margaret Atwood; The Testaments; decolonization; female empowerment; Canadian identity.
Thirty-four years after the publication of The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a novel that has become a classic of dystopian literature thanks to its ability to speculate, with frightening accuracy, about the gloomy future of humanity, the Canadian author Margaret Atwood released The Testaments (2019), her long-awaited Gileadian sequel. In this latest novel, the author revisits the theocratic Republic of Gilead through three new characters — Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy —, answering some of the questions that have perdured on the minds of her readers for more than three decades. However, does Atwood's newest novel have the same seminal potential found in its predecessor? If literature influences and is influenced by the social processes that encompass human experience, how can The Testaments contribute to the resolution of the new political and cultural problems of the 21st century, such as the frequent attacks on women's rights and the advance of US neo-imperialism on post-colonial countries such as Canada? Would it be possible to consider The Testaments a decolonizing novel, given the subversive and revolutionary way in which this sequel develops its female narrators? In search of answers to these questions, we found, through the usage of aspects of feminist criticism (DuPlessis, 1985; Showalter, 1994, 2009; Zolin, 2009a, 2009b) and postcolonial theory (Bezerra, 2020; Bonnici, 2007; Hall, 2006), that this novel creates opportunities not only for female empowerment (Moraes, 2022; Sardenberg, 2016) but also for the re-signification of Canadian cultural identity (Atwood, 2004; Miljan, Cooper, 2005; Oliveira, 2021). In this way, it is possible to say that The Testaments is a pertinent and powerful novel that contributes to the adoption of a more critical mindset by its readers, since it promotes the decolonization (Braga, 2018; Mignolo, 2017) of the political, cultural, and gender relations that permeate women and post-colonial subjects both inside and outside its fictional universe.