26 pages • 52 minutes read
Margaret AtwoodDeath By Landscape
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Difficult Transition to Womanhood
Like much of Atwood’s writing, “Death by Landscape” explores issues related to womanhood and femininity in a way that can be considered feminist. The bulk of the story is told in flashback and spans Lucy’s and Lois’s preteen and early teen years. For girls, Atwood suggests, this adolescent period is a particularly fraught time because it marks the end of the relative freedom of childhood. As children at Camp Manitou, Lucy and Lois are still mostly exempt from gender roles; they participate in the same kinds of activities boys might (canoeing, hiking, etc.), take part in “rowdy sing-songs,” and pretend to be explorers (Part 2, Paragraph 12). However, given when the story is set (the mid-20th century), this kind of physicality and adventurousness are possible only in the years before the girls hit puberty; at that point, they encounter the gender roles they’ll be forced to conform to as adults, which demand that women be quiet and gentle and that their most important relationships be the romantic ones they form with men rather than the friendships they form among themselves.
There are hints early in the story that the happiness Lois and Lucy experience in their years at the camp is unsustainable. Atwood reminds readers, for instance, that even children are subject to some gender norms when she notes that the “totemic clan system” for boys involves animals like wolves, whereas the one for girls is limited to birds—presumably because they seem more delicate and less threatening. The rules surrounding femininity become more pressing as the girls grow older; Cappie addresses the girls as “braves” when she sends them off on their canoe trip because, as Lois says, “the game cannot be played by substituting the word squaw” (Part 5, Paragraph 2). For the society Lois is part of, it’s unthinkable that an adult married woman—even one from an entirely different culture—would go off exploring.
The problem, therefore, isn’t so much the physical changes associated with adolescence but rather the cultural expectations surrounding it. Lucy in particular seems frustrated by what she sees of marriage and romance; her parents are divorced, she dislikes her stepfather, and she suspects her mother of having an affair. Coupled with the fact that Lucy repeatedly expresses a desire to escape from her life at home, her disappearance can therefore be understood as a rejection of adult womanhood. Lois imagines Lucy as having “stepped sideways and disappeared from time”—that is, from the forward progression of time and growing up (Part 9, Paragraph 3). Furthermore, there are hints that Lois wishes that she, too, could have escaped adulthood in this way. Although she has led a very conventional life as a wife and mother, she “never felt she was paying full attention” to what was going on around her; her childhood experiences were ultimately much more vivid and perhaps happy (Part 9, Paragraph 3). While Lucy’s disappearance at first seems to be a cautionary tale about the dangers adolescence poses for girls, it’s arguably Lois who ultimately serves as a warning to the reader by surviving her teenage years only to lead a kind of living death.
Canada’s Relationship to Its Land and History
At least on the surface, “Death by Landscape” seems to be a story about the treacherousness of the Canadian wilderness that Lucy vanishes into. This is certainly the message that Lois takes from the experience:
She’s seen travelogues of this country, aerial photographs; it looks different from above, bigger, more hopeless: lake after lake, random blue puddles in dark green bush, the trees like bristles. How could you ever find anything there, once it was lost? (Part 9, Paragraph 6).
The fact that Lois contrasts this danger and chaos explicitly with the “tidy” landscapes of Europe suggests that her views of Canada are representative of those of other white Canadians—that is, nonindigenous Canadians who came to the region as colonizers only to find settlement more difficult than they imagined (Part 9, Paragraph 8).
However, these colonizers did manage to settle in Canada, and the Canada that Atwood depicts in “Death by Landscape” is very much a colonized country. Although every character in the story is white, they draw heavily on First Nations culture, often in ways that Lois realizes in retrospect were inaccurate and disrespectful. Cappie, for instance, wears a “row of frazzle-ended feathers” in her bandana and red lipstick streaks on her cheeks to lead the girls in a mock Indian ceremony the night before the canoe trip (Part 4, Paragraph 4). Based on Lois’s reaction at the time, it seems likely that the point of this kind of cultural appropriation is to escape from the constraints of Western society—especially the constraints placed on women. By adopting the identity of a “brave”—a man from a culture supposedly less “civilized”—Lois and the other girls can fantasize about rejecting society’s rules and living closer to nature (Part 4, Paragraph 6).
With that said, it’s clear that there are supposed to be limits on this kind of cross-cultural identification—not out of sensitivity but out of a desire to preserve the status quo. Lois and Lucy are supposed to conform to Western gender norms whenever they’re not at Camp Manitou, and they are to eventually give up this kind of playacting altogether. If Lucy’s disappearance is in some way voluntary, it therefore makes even more sense that it unsettles those around her, since she is in effect rejecting modern Western society. Lois’s views on the hostility of the Canadian wilderness could therefore be an attempt to deny the implications of this by insisting that Lucy must have been killed. They may also be related to the uneasiness Lois now feels about the way Camp Manitou appropriated indigenous culture; Lois imagines that the land itself is still resisting control, which implies that the colonization of Canada wasn’t as complete as it actually was. Regardless, it’s certainly the case that Lois’s feelings toward Camp Manitou and what happened there are colored by modern Canada’s views on its colonial history.
The Trauma of Loss
Long before Atwood tells her readers exactly what happens on the camping trip, she makes it clear that it has a lasting and negative impact on Lois, explaining that it is both her “first canoe trip, and her last” (Part 2, Paragraph 2). Lucy is Lois’s best friend, so it’s not surprising that her presumed death affects Lois dramatically. Lucy and Lois’s relationship is also complex, so Lois’s reaction to Lucy’s loss isn’t simply straightforward grief. For one, it seems likely that Lois is unconsciously jealous of Lucy’s wealth and good looks; when Lucy tells Lois she’s “lucky” to have a “placid and satisfactory” home life, Lois thinks that “she might as well say boring, because this is how it makes Lois feel” (Part 4, Paragraph 2). Assuming Lois does envy Lucy, it makes sense that she takes Cappie’s hints about her involvement in Lucy’s disappearance so much to heart; on some level, Lois may have wished her friend gone. Regardless, Lois seems to have spent much of her life punishing herself for Lucy’s disappearance—for example, by surrounding herself with paintings that remind her of the place where it happened.
Lois’s grief is also complicated by the extent to which her sense of her own identity overlaps with Lucy’s; Lucy (at least in Lois’s mind) embodies Lois’s more adventurous and uninhibited side, so her loss also marks the death of that aspect of Lois’s personality. As a result, her life after Lucy’s disappearance is safe and predictable but also colorless in comparison to the life she might have led. When Atwood writes that Lois is “always listening for another voice, the voice of a person who should have been there but was not,” she describes that voice as an “echo”—that is, a variation of Lois’s own voice (Part 9, Paragraph 4). Ultimately, Lois seems as haunted by the loss of this other version of herself as she is by the loss of her friend.
“Death by Landscape” also considers the broader effects of Lucy’s disappearance beyond her friendship with Lois. Atwood devotes particular attention to the impact on Cappie, whose life falls apart as a result of what happens to Lucy; Cappie has devoted herself more or less entirely to the camp that her parent established, only to lose it overnight. What is truly upsetting, however, is the lack of any clear explanation, as Lois herself eventually realizes: “She could see Cappie’s desperation, her need for a story, a real story with a reason in it; anything but the senseless vacancy Lucy had left for her to deal with” (Part 8, Paragraph 16). Lucy’s fate is of course especially mysterious, but this passage also points to what is perhaps a universal experience in the wake of death or disappearance: the need to make sense of it in some way and the impossibility of doing so. In fact, Lois finds that the more she recounts the events surrounding Lucy’s disappearance, the less she believes them. “Death by Landscape” is in some ways a story about the limits storytelling has when it comes to loss; at least in the case of certain especially traumatic cases, Atwood suggests that there simply isn’t any narrative that will “make any sense” to survivors (Part 8, Paragraph 2).
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