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In the end is my beginning, as someone once said. Who was that? Mary, Queen of Scots, if history does not lie. Her motto, with a phoenix rising from its ashes, embroidered on a wall hanging. Such excellent embroiderers, women are.

In Part XXVII, Aunt Lydia concludes her manuscript by positioning herself in a lineage stretching back to Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary served as the Queen of Scotland from 1542 to 1567. Her reign ended in a moment of crisis that forced her to abdicate the throne to her one-year-old son. After trying and failing to retrieve the throne, Mary sought protection from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England. But Elizabeth distrusted Mary and threw her in prison. In her eighteenth year of imprisonment, Mary became involved in the so-called Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Shortly before her execution in 1586, Mary embroidered the following words: “In my end is my beginning.” It is these words that Aunt Lydia invokes at the conclusion of her manuscript. By repeating this motto, Aunt Lydia draws attention to certain parallels between her life and Mary’s. Like the Queen of Scots, Aunt Lydia was forcibly removed from power and unjustly imprisoned during the coup. Aunt Lydia also sees a parallel between Mary’s plot to take down Elizabeth and her own plot to take down Gilead.

In addition to the motto that situates her in the same lineage as Mary, Queen of Scots, Aunt Lydia’s reference to embroidery has important symbolic implications as well. Embroidery has come up elsewhere in the novel as a double-edged symbol, as when Agnes embroidered a skull on a footstool square in Part X. Embroidery represented a respected domestic craft every Wife should master. Agnes leveraged this fact to signal her virtue, and she claimed to use the skull as a traditional form of iconography known as the memento mori, or “reminder of death.” Secretly, however, she understood the skull as a curse against Paula. In this example, embroidery represents a respectable domestic craft that nonetheless has the capacity for subversion. Like Agnes, Aunt Lydia considers herself something of an embroiderer, albeit in a more metaphorical sense. The art of embroidery consists of making many small stitches that, when carefully composed and skillfully executed, create an image. Aunt Lydia has “composed” her plot to take down Gilead from many small pieces of insight and acts of manipulation. These small units will, she hopes, come together to manifest her vision of a brighter future.

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