“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
This quote details how Lydia waited too long before attempting to leave the US. Despite hearing daily how badly things were going, and even seeing the government shut down, she believed things would get better and the issues would resolved. It wasn’t until she went to work and was rounded up by guards that she realized she had misjudged how severe the situation had become and was now caught in it.
“But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity. I’m afraid we did not fully appreciate the extent to which those of Aunt Lydia’s generation had been harden in the fire. They had a ruthlessness about that that we lacked”.
This quote shows that looking back, Agnes sees that her and other Gileadean children never knew about the way life used to be for women. They grew up only knowing Gilead’s strict regime, and could not have fathomed the freedoms and rights enjoyed by women previously. She notes that women of Aunt Lydia’s generation had to live through this stark contrast and adapt, in a way that the next generation did not.
“I needed to revert to the mulish underclass child, the determined drudge, the brainy overachiever, the strategic ladder-climber who’d got me to the social perch from which I’d just been deposed. I needed to work the angles, once I could find out what the angles were. I’d been in tight corners before. I had prevailed. That was my story to myself.”
This quote depicts Lydia’s decision to ultimately fight for her survival in the newly-formed Gilead. She knows she will have to do terrible things to ensure her survival but she has accepted this in order to climb her way to the top, just as she pulled herself up from a low-class childhood to become a judge. She understands that prevailing will come with a cost, but perhaps she will also be able to change the system eventually, from a place of power.
“It was the way things were done, it was how things were, it was how they had to be for the good of the future of Gilead: the few must make sacrifices for the sake of the many. The Aunts were agreed on that; they taught it; but still I knew this part of it wasn’t right. But I couldn’t condemn Tabitha, even though she’d accepted a stolen child. She didn’t make the world the way it was, and she had been my mother, and I had loved her and she had loved me. I still loved her, and perhaps she still loved me"
Even though Agnes has been raised in Gilead, she questions the morality of some of its systems. Despite agreeing with the basic tenet that their society must work together and sacrifice for the future of Gilead, she knows there is something wrong about taking a baby away from its rightful mother. She has the maturity to know that her own situation was not Tabitha’s fault, despite accepting a baby taken from someone else, because she would have been powerful against Gilead’s regime. Ultimately, Tabitha had raised Agnes with love, which was more than many other children in Gilead could say.
“Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.”
This quote reveals the struggle Agnes had as she started to learn more about the world through her time as a Supplicant Aunt. Growing up in Gilead, she would not have been allowed to read/write and would never have learned. As an Aunt in training, she is taught to read and starts to read to bible, realizing that the stories they had been told as children were not exactly the same as what was actually written. Reading leads her to question the motives behind the strict regimes of Gilead and whether the purpose is actually to serve God, or the powerful men in charge.
