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.
Literary Devices
Allusion
Allusion is a common literary device that involves referring to a person, event, place, etc. from the world outside the text. In many cases, including in “Death by Landscape,” it takes the form of a reference to another piece of art or literature; Atwood not only describes pieces by the Group of Seven in detail but also alludes to various myths from Classical Greece and Canada’s own indigenous peoples. The raven, for instance, is a trickster god in much First Nations folklore, which makes Atwood’s references to the bird throughout the story significant. As third-year students, Lucy and Lois are “Ravens” in the Camp Manitou’s classification system, and Lois hears a raven calling just before Lucy shouts and vanishes; the implication is perhaps that Lucy has encountered the Raven god or that she herself is a raven-like figure because of her ability to disappear into thin air.
Later in the story, Atwood offers a different possible explanation for Lucy’s disappearance when Lois wonders “how many trees there were on the cliff just before Lucy disappeared” and whether “there was one more, afterward” (Part 9, Paragraph 9). In this case, the allusion is to the Greek myth of Daphne—a nymph who transforms into a tree to escape the advances of the god Apollo. In other words, the reference underscores the idea that Lucy’s fate is intertwined with her rejection of society’s prescribed role for women as passive objects of male desire.
Foreshadowing
Writers use foreshadowing to hint at events that occur later in a story, piquing readers’ interest and causing them to become more invested in the plot. Foreshadowing can be used to lay the groundwork for either good or bad plot developments, but in the case of the latter, it often helps establish a tense or uneasy mood. This is the case in “Death by Landscape,” where Atwood repeatedly drops clues implying that something horrible will happen on the girls’ canoe trip; for instance, when describing the loons Lois hears the first night out on the river, Atwood says that “at the time [they] did not sound like grief”—the implication being that the same calls do sound sorrowful later (Part 6, Paragraph 21). Atwood also uses foreshadowing to add nuance and ambiguity to Lucy’s eventual disappearance. For instance, Lucy’s remark that she doesn’t want to return to Chicago implies that she might have vanished willingly, either by killing herself, running away, or using some supernatural means.
Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is a literary device that involves describing artwork (typically visual art) in some detail. Although ekphrasis doesn’t need to refer to a particular existing piece (Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, isn’t necessarily a description of any specific urn), “Death by Landscape” does in fact revolve around several well-known painters, and it’s possible to match Atwood’s descriptions to individual pieces; the “yellow autumn wood with the ice-blue gleam of a pond half-seen through the interlaced branches,” for example, could be a description of Tom Thomson’s Opulent October (Part 1, Paragraph 3).
Even more than any specific piece, however, “Death by Landscape” is interested in describing what characterizes the “Group of Seven” as a school. Toward the end of the story, for instance, Atwood contrasts Lois’s paintings to traditional landscape art:
There aren’t any landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy European sense, with a gentle hill, a curving river, a cottage, a mountain in the background, a golden evening sky. Instead there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path” (Part 9, Paragraph 8).
Here, Atwood uses ekphrasis to develop the story’s themes and characters. The “tangled” style of the paintings seems to reinforce the idea that the Canadian wilderness is uniquely dangerous and liable to swallow people up. The description, however, is filtered through Lois’s perception and therefore says as much about her as it does about the wilderness itself; for Lois, the paintings have no “backgrounds” because they depict a traumatic experience that has never left the forefront of her mind.
Related Titles
By Margaret Atwood
