The Massachusetts Medievalist on Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Twentieth Century Cosmetics Companies
The Massachusetts Medievalist has been on quasi-hiatus in her term paper cave but has now filed grades and enjoyed a quiet Christmas holiday. In early December, I read Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, since two of my seniors paired it with The Handmaid's Tale in their seminar essays; I went down some women's history rabbit holes in the process (with more to follow!). Aunt Lydia, a minor character in Handmaid, is the protagonist of Testaments and her seemingly innocuous name is actually important to an understanding of her character. [SPOILER ALERT: the following includes discussion of the end of Testaments]
The "Historical Notes" at the end of Handmaid tell us that Gilead's Aunts chose "names derived from commercial products available to women in the immediate pre-Gilead period, and thus familiar and reassuring to them- the names of cosmetic lines, cake mixes, frozen desserts, and even medicinal remedies." Early in Testaments, Atwood provides us much more detail about the Aunts as a class of women in Gilead, from their medieval-nunnery-like space in Ardua Hall to their Mormon-like requirement to go on a conversion mission before attainment of full Aunt-status. The four "founders," whose portraits grace many female-designated spaces in Gilead, are Vidala, Helena, Elizabeth, and Lydia.
The first three were seemingly easy to match to the explanation in the earlier "historical notes" – Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden came immediately to mind, and a little googling produced the convincing explanation of Aunt Vidala as a feminized form of Vidal Sassoon. Other Aunts from both books were also easy to peg: Sara Lee cakes, Estee Lauder cosmetics, Dove soap, Immortelle face cream, Victoria's Secret.
Aunt Lydia herself, the most prominent of Testaments' three narrators, was harder to pin down. While Lydia Pinkham's "Vegetable Compound" was certainly marketed as a "medicinal remedy," its nineteenth-century origin and heyday does not place it in the "immediate pre-Gilead period," which I interpreted to mean roughly the mid-twentieth century. I hit a lot of stumbling blocks while googling around, since there are a lot of current makeup and beauty influencers named Lydia…..but eventually turned up Lydia O'Leary, who I think is Aunt Lydia's namesake.
Lydia O'Leary (1900-1982) was the inventor of a highly-specialized foundation makeup designed to cover extreme birthmarks and discolorations. She received a patent for her invention in 1932. A version of her successful company, Covermark, is still in existence.
O'Leary was born with a large port-wine stain birthmark on the left side of her face. Company legend has it that she was inspired to create the formula when working as a placard-artist and she needed to paint over a mistake. Her initial patent application was denied but she won her in-person appeal: during the hearing, she dramatically removed her makeup to expose the port-wine stain (which the reviewers had not been able to see).
Image from Cosmetics and Skin: Covermark (accessed 29 December 2022)
Aunt Lydia is similarly working under cover throughout Testaments, and indeed was doing so in Handmaid as well (although we had no way of knowing that). She hides the handwritten sheets of her story inside a copy of Newman's Apologia Pro Sua Vita (defense of his life, get it?). Like many double agents throughout actual and literary history, she is conflicted about her role as both leader in and saboteur of the regime. Her elaborate strategy ultimately succeeds, however, and the information she smuggles into Canada via Agnes/Victoria and Daisy/Nicole ends up toppling Gilead's rulers, the Sons of Jacob, even at the cost of her own life. Like Lydia O'Leary, Aunt Lydia is creative, strategic, and persistent. And like Lydia O'Leary, Aunt Lydia successfully conceals her "true colors" until the final, crucial moment of revelation.
Like many notable women, Lydia O'Leary doesn't have a Wikipedia page. I'm working to correct that now. Stay tuned.