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.
Symbols & Motifs
Lois’s Paintings
The paintings Lois collects are the story’s central motif; “Death by Landscape” opens and closes with descriptions of them, and the title refers to them. They also, of course, depict the kind of landscape that perhaps killed Lucy: lakes, cliffs, and forests in the backwoods of Canada. That being the case, it’s possible that Lois’s collection is an attempt to tame or control the dangers of the natural world, which she continues to fear even as an old woman.
However, Lois does not find the presence of the paintings calming; on the contrary, “looking at them fills her with a wordless unease” (Part 1, Paragraph 5). Given that Lois has felt guilty ever since Lucy’s disappearance, it therefore seems possible that she collects paintings that remind her of that day as a way of punishing herself. It’s noteworthy, however, that part of what unnerves Lois about the paintings is the sense that something in them is watching her—that is, that they aren’t true landscapes but rather depictions of something conscious. Lois eventually concludes that the thing that’s watching her is Lucy herself, but it isn’t clear if this is comforting to her either; the story’s closing description of Lucy as “entirely alive” and “in Lois’s apartment” is somewhat menacing (Part 9, Paragraph 12).
Ultimately, then, Lois’s collection serves as a way for her to explore her attitudes toward Lucy, nature, her past, and herself. The scenes they represent aren’t inherently threatening, but they become so to Lois because of her troubled relationship to Lucy’s disappearance and everything that follows; in trying to distance herself from everything that seems wild and dangerous, she has only become more fearful and anxious.
Monty Manitou
“Monty Manitou” is the name given to the stuffed moose head situated over the fireplace in the dining hall of Camp Manitou. The head, which functions as “a sort of mascot,” is “huge,” “molting,” and “look[s] somehow carnivorous,” and the older girls tell new campers that it’s haunted (Part 2, Paragraph 10). Lois soon realizes that this isn’t true, which points to the moose’s real significance in Atwood’s story: as a symbol of modern white Canada’s relationship to the country’s land and history. On one hand, as a hunting trophy, the head seems to speak to the success European settlers have had colonizing and controlling the Canadian wilderness. However, the fact that many of the girls are frightened by the head suggests ongoing anxiety that the process of colonization is incomplete and that lingering indigenous or supernatural forces could upset it. Significantly, though, the girls are mistaken; moose aren’t actually carnivorous, a fact that suggests that the Canadian wilderness isn’t so much inherently dangerous so much as it is made dangerous by people. The moose’s name encapsulates all of this, since it ties an English name, “Monty,” to the Algonquian word “Manitou”—a term for the spirit underlying all of nature.
Birds
Birds appear throughout “Death by Landscape” in both literal and figurative ways. Lois mentions hearing birds like loons and ravens on the ill-fated canoe trip, Cappie’s head “jiggl[es] like a chicken” (Part 2, Paragraph 11), the girls sing “Alouette” (“lark” in French), and the camp divides its students into classes named after species of birds: “Chickadees, Bluejays, Ravens, and Kingfishers—these were the names Camp Manitou assigned to the different age groups, a sort of totemic clan system” (Part 3, Paragraph 2). Some of the species Atwood mentions have particular significance—specifically, the raven, which features prominently in the mythology of Canada’s First Nations. More generally, the references to birds also hint at another possible explanation for Lucy’s disappearance. Atwood draws attention to the fact that none of the campers hear a “splash” or the “sound of falling rock,” as they might expect to if Lucy in fact fell or jumped from the cliff (Part 7, Paragraph 29). Coupled with the association between Lucy and ravens, as well as Lois’s idea that Lucy might have turned into a tree, the suggestion is that Lucy perhaps transformed into a bird and flew away, leaving “no clue, nothing at all” (Part 7, Paragraph 29).
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By Margaret Atwood
