Margaret Atwood's Death By Landscape

The short story "Death by Landscape" well describes the psychology of Lois, the heroine of the story. One incident that occurred to her when she was 13 years old, affects her whole life. As a thirteen year old, she looses her best friend, Lucy, on a canoeing trip in a summer camp. While Lucy was going to the bathroom behind a tree on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river and Lois waiting where she wasn't able to see her, Lucy disappeared without a trace. The story's setting and characters shows the existence of two egos in one person's life.

The essay The Writer's Responsibility by Margaret Atwood is written with the intent of urging the privileged writer to utilize their position to speak out for those who are unable to. Her intention is a noble one which I am in agreement with, however, in order for her to express this intent her tone is quite straightforward. It is this candid tone in combination with several generalizations which I have a gripe with. For example, on several occasions Atwood degrades her readers through grand generalizations such as when she says “on a whole the audience prefers art not to be a mirror held to life but a disneyland of the soul” (Atwood 1).

Lucy was living a life situated around a different set of nurture characteristics when compared to other children. At the age of 7, she was living in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City along with her parents. There was no mention as to whether she had siblings. The Upper East Side of New York is considered to be affluent and home to many wealthy people. She

The main character in Margaret Atwood’s short story “Death By Landscape” is Lois. We meet her as an elderly woman sitting in her apartment alone. We do not get to know her real age in the story, but we get some indications of her age. She was at Camp Manitou at the age of thirteen when the incident with Lucy happened. We get to know that several years have passed since then.

Anyone who ever felt different or had any kind of physical characteristic or flaw that they were self conscious about while growing up will relate to Lucy and what she went through. If you were too tall or too small, had a facial birthmark or a big nose, crooked teeth or frizzy hair or acne, if you were not beautiful in the traditional sense or were different in any way- you will understand Lucy. Her profound insight into beauty, and what is beautiful, will hit home with you. It did with me.

Lucy was born August 13, 1818 in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. She had 8 siblings and her parents were farmers. Lucy’s father taught her to have anti-slavery beliefs, but she was angered that her father thought that men were dominant over women. She had a passion for public speaking and women’s rights. At sixteen she became a teacher and was furious when her brother told her that women had a lower income than men. To try to solve that

Lucy had heard stories before, about the pillaging the "savages" would do in a town after exacting vengeance. The newspapers loved to exaggerate moments like these to sell and try to find people to give "first hand" accounts, but she also knew that many of these reports had some truth to them.

In ‘Lucy’ the character Lucy, an immigrant girl, leaves her home in the West Indies to come to America in order to reinvent herself and to discover her own identity. Her struggles for personal freedom and independence would require her complete disconnection from her family especially her mother. To do so, Lucy not only had to let go of her former identity, but she also has to void herself of the self-destruction and loneliness. Lucy’s liberation from the past is the key element to her finding her new self. That too will require her to mentally recolonized her past and present in a way she feels comfortable. The novel places Lucy at a cross road of culture and identities Antiguan and American. Upon arrival to America to work as an au pair for an

The painting hanging on her wall are more than just a reflection of the past. The paintings symbolize her inability to recognize Lucy’s pain. The relationship between the two girls is limited by an invisible social constraint. Lois has an idealized perception of Lucy’s. She holds Lucy in such high regard, that she is unable to recognize lLucy’s pain. This was a crippling social construct between the two friends. Lucy enjoyed bragging about her life and she loved the attention from Lois. The paintings are a reminder of Lois’s inability to accept the weakness of Lucy, or the idea that she could need her

Atwood uses simple, but effective imagery to engage the senses of the reader, for example: ‘[…] that is a fish, blue and flat’ (l. 4). These images grow more elaborate and it becomes clear that she uses metaphors and simile to convey more intricate ideas. As the speaker confesses that there is more to the world than they let on, the use of enjambment, repetition and punctuation directs the focus on certain words and gives the poem certain acuteness and urgency as the pace increases: ‘Once you have learned these words | you will learn that there are more |words than you can ever learn.’ (l. 21-23).

They are very over protective of her and create a safety net over her whole life. So everyday her father and brother repaint the barn which she paints everyday, watch The Sixth Sense, and provide her with a copy of the same paper. Her brother and dad spend most all of their time keeping Lucy from the truth. Her lack of short term memory and possession of long term memories turn her brother and fathers lives’ into an everyday replay. One time after Henry and Lucy break up he visits Lucy and sees all of her paintings. Obviously when he comes by she doesn’t recognize him except that he looks like the man she has been painting. All her recent paintings include Henry in them. That means Henry has helped her some what retain some of her short term memories.

Nature has an undefinable meaning as the theme is utilised in literature, and it has been a topic of reflection within the Romanticists since the beginning of the era. Romanticism and nature and inextricably linked ideas. Poets; Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman wrote during the romantic era, and both drew heavily from aspects of nature in their work. Nature can be paralleled against several things, including humanity and the idea of life and death. The contrast between the natural world and the artificial world, and what this means for society, is also strongly eluded to in Dickinson and Whitman’s poems. Each poet uses nature as the backbone to their poetry in several instances. Dickinson’s, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”, (Dickinson, 19) and “My Life Has Stood A Loaded Gun”, (Dickinson, 69) are strong examples of this. Whitman’s, “Song of Myself”, (Whitman, 29) and, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, (Whitman, 255) are also poems that show the connection between nature and romanticism. Poets, Dickinson and Whitman engage with romanticism in a creative and constructive manner through the utilisation of the natural world.

The use of character, style, and point of view that Atwood uses to write this story gives you a real feeling of pity for these characters, only having horrible lows or average highs in their relationships. It appears that there is no great place to be in her story. Reading this story for the first time, the reader could assume Atwood has an obsession with bad relationships, boring average marriages, and death. The key to understanding what the author is trying to convey is realizing how the stories all link together and how they all lack the essence of excitement and desire. The author brings the idea that without focusing on the “how and why” of life and only focusing on the “what, what, what” will leave you with an average

Death by Landscape does not end at this point. Lois is looking at the paintings on her wall. In all her paintings she sees her friend Lucy and she still can hear her shouting. On page eight block one Atwood writes that a dead person is a body and occupies space, a grave, but Lucy has no body, no grave. She only exists in Lois’ mind and – in her pictures on the wall. “You can’t see her exactly, but she’s there…” (page 8, block 2). Everyone has to be somewhere and the paintings are where Lucy is. In Lois’ mind she is still alive. Lois was going through the happenings of this particular day again and again, throughout her life, torturing herself with guilt and never really finding peace. This feeling of guilt was implanted in her mind from the frustrated owner of Camp Manitou, knowing about the consequences of the loss of a child in her camp. Lois knew that she didn’t push Lucy off the cliff, but she left her alone, just for a moment, unattended and unwatched, knowing about her unhappy family situation, knowing Lucy didn’t want to return to her

During Lucy’s adventure she goes through several tests of her character. The first test she encounters is trying to convince her siblings that Narnia does exist (Emerson). The first time she tried to show them Narnia, the wardrobe did not lead to anything unlike it had when she entered it before (Lewis 25). Many at this time would think that they had dreamed or imagined Narnia, but not Lucy. She knew what she had seen and felt and would not allow others to bully her into thinking otherwise (Emerson). Her siblings did not believe her and ridiculed her by making fun of her saying it was all just a hoax and that she was just a little girl who had an imagination (Lewis 25). Later on in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy’s second test arrives. She is the only one who is willing to take responsibility for everything that had taken place in Narnia such as Edmund, her brother, being captured and also helping the Narnians escape the injustices from the White Witch. She even goes as far as