Death By Landscape

“Death by Landscape” is a short story by Margaret Atwood, initially published in her 1991 collection Wilderness Tips. Atwood, who was born in Ottawa in 1939, has become one of Canada’s most celebrated writers over the course of a career that has spanned nearly six decades. As “Death by Landscape” demonstrates, Atwood’s nationality is not simply incidental to her writing, which comprises everything from poetry to literary criticism; Canadian history and culture feature prominently in much of Atwood’s work, and she played a key role in the development of a school of writing that would come to be known as “Southern Ontario Gothic.” As its name suggests, this school uses images and ideas associated with Gothic literature, such as insanity or the taboo, to explore different aspects of Canadian experience. “Death by Landscape” falls firmly into this genre, bringing Gothic tropes like suicide and supernatural threats to bear on the question of what it means to be a white, middle-class woman in 20th-century Canada.

Atwood’s story also touches on another distinctive feature of Canadian literature: the idea of survival. Atwood herself argued that this was the defining characteristic of Canadian writing in her 1972 work of criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature; in part because of Canada’s colonial history, and in part simply because of the harshness of its weather and terrain, Atwood argues that Canadian art and identity center on the struggle to stay alive. This struggle can be literal, figurative, or—as in “Death by Landscape”—both. On the face of it, the story is about the dangers of the Canadian wilderness, which kill Lucy while allowing Lois to escape. By the story’s final paragraphs, however, it’s unclear whether Lois’s survival was desirable, or in fact even survival at all. Arguably, Lucy’s disappearance into the wilderness allows her to escape from the restricted life she would have led if she grew up to become a wife and mother. Lois, meanwhile, not only does go on to lead this life but is also so haunted by Lucy’s presumed death that everything that happens to her afterward seems comparatively unreal and unimportant.

This in turn points to another major theme of “Death by Landscape”: the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Gender is a concern in much of Atwood’s work, and she often tackles it from a broadly feminist point of view—most famously in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which is set in a patriarchal dystopia. Although “Death by Landscape” doesn’t deal with sexism or femininity in such explicit detail, these issues form the backdrop to the story and help create a sense of unease throughout it. Lois, Lucy, and the other girls at Camp Manitou are just on the verge of adolescence and consequently the age at which they’re expected to give up activities like canoeing and camping in favor of a more traditionally feminine role. Both Lucy and Lois, however, are ambivalent about the transition to womanhood, with Lucy in particular seeming unnerved by what she sees of the adult world of romance and sex. The teenage years are a dangerous and fraught time for girls, regardless of what exactly happens to Lucy.