“Gilead is within you”: A Theocratic Narrative Setting of Cultural memory in Atwood’s The Testaments

Abstract

This article attempts to explore the synthetic relationship between group identities and their effects on cultural memory in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. It will investigate how Atwood’s dystopian fiction conspicuously weaves threads of cultural identity in the totalitarian society. While examining the work, the researchers found three forms of Memory Figures channelizing society: Architecture and time, Identical groupings, and Language. With significant attention to the prequel, The Handmaid’s Tale, this article will consider The Testaments for the dissection of hard-wired cultural memory formation. This article focuses on how a politically unsettled society of Gilead, through its Memory Figures, inscribes a cultural narrative while instructing individual memories. Atwood’s usage of these Memory Figures to achieve a theocratic regime has been scrutinized in this article. The Architecture of Gilead was given an intrusive wall of glass, where the symbol of eyes prevails, to externalize the surveillance of God on each one of its citizens, thereby forming a cultural memory of subjectivity. To make the citizens identify with groups, this theocratic regime specifies roles to citizens according to their rank for men and according to reproductive efficiency for women. Keeping in view the relevance of language in forming cultural memory, Atwood prescribed a set of greetings such as ‘under his eyes,’ and ‘praise be’ to make profound imprints on the individual memory of citizens, which has been discussed in the study. These three Memory Figures simultaneously form collective memory imprints on the citizens of Gilead, which in time became inherent cultural memories. This article explores how, by politicizing the issue of cultural memory in The Testaments, Atwood taps into the agency of people and establishes language control (communicative) to form the cultural memory narrative.