Space, Power, and Resistance: Women’s Utopian Spatial Desires in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Abstract The female protagonists in Margaret Atwood’s duology The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments do not surrender themselves to the dystopian world, but desire to change the status quo and act on it. Drawing on scholarship in power politics, utopian studies, and space studies, this article intends to interrogate Atwood’s attention to aligning the utopian desire with space to act out resistance and agency. It argues that although in this duology the totalitarian regime disciplines their bodies and minds through representations of space, the female protagonists have strong utopian desires for a better world, which are presented through imagining utopian spaces. Atwood underscores the importance of harboring a utopian spatial desire to hope, to act, and to change. As serious commentaries on the sociopolitical conditions of today’s world, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments offer utopian hope as well as dystopian warnings to contemporary readers.