Summary

The third chapter, “Hymn,” returns to the perspective of the woman writing the “Ardua Hall Holograph” (31). Identifying herself as Aunt Lydia, she worries about what will happen to her in the future – whether she and “the regime…will topple” leading to her execution (31). Speaking in second-person, she expresses concerns over what the reader thinks of her, knowing that she herself has taken on mythic quality in Gilead, as someone both to fear and to emulate in moral conduct. She describes herself as “swollen with power…but also nebulous with it – formless, shape-shifting” (32).

Turning to the present, which is around Easter, Lydia writes that she allowed some of the Aunts and Supplicants to dye eggs pink and blue in the Refectory for dinnertime. After leading a prayer about the Spring Equinox and Baby Nicole’s return, Aunt Lydia heads to the Reading Room of the...