Post-Truth, Testimony and Crises of Trust in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s two Gilead novels, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985 [1998]) and The Testaments (2019) mimic testimony. This formal feature of the novels, combined with their dystopian setting, enables them to explore a crisis of trust with regard to narrative accounts. This article argues that, while both novels suggest that there is no way of definitively establishing any particular narrative as being credible, Shoshana Felman’s notion of the alignment of testimony is a means of achieving a qualified degree of trust in texts. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, this alignment remains fragile, whereas the use of multiple narrators in The Testaments enables a firmer alignment of values and experiences, and hence represents a stronger claim to the ability of texts to establish their credibility.