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Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.

In Part XVIII, Agnes recounts how an anonymous source within Ardua Hall began to slip folders into her pile of daily work tasks. These folders contained information that she, as a Supplicant Aunt, did not yet officially have the privilege to examine. The first time Agnes received one of these folders, she learned some top-secret information about her stepmother, Paula. Specifically, the documents revealed that Paula had been responsible for her first husband’s death. Prior to his death she was already engaged in an extra-marital affair with Commander Kyle, and presumably she wanted her husband out of the way so she could marry her lover instead. To make this happen, Paula falsely befriended her Handmaid and pretended to help her escape from Gilead. After the Handmaid left, Paula murdered her husband and claimed that her Handmaid did it. Authorities tracked the Handmaid down, interrogated her, and executed her. In the aftermath of the scandal, different stories about the murder circulated among Marthas, but all of these stories maintained Paula’s innocence. Thus, when Agnes finally learned the real truth it had a shocking effect that made her distrustful of every other story she’d ever heard.

Agnes’s distrust of stories also stemmed from another revelation that came when she earned the privilege to read the Bible on her own. The day the Aunts presented Agnes with her own Bible, Becka warned her that it didn’t say what their instructors in the Vidala School had taught them. Agnes found out what Becka meant when she turned to Judges 19–21 and read the original version of the story she refers to as the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces. Back in school Aunt Vidala had told a censored version of the story. This version emphasized the brutal violence perpetrated against a woman who ran away from her master, and it framed the violence as justified. With access to the original text, Agnes realized that Aunt Vidala had neglected to discuss how, even in the story, this violence was viewed as barbaric, and in fact led to a war among the twelve Tribes of Israel. In retrospect, Agnes understood that Aunt Vidala’s intentionally modified her version of the story to inspire fear in her pupils. Now that Agnes understood this form of ideological manipulation, she would protect herself from it in the future.

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