ABSTRACT
Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Death by Landscape” (1991), depicts a wilderness, at once threatening, perplexing, yet exhilarating for the women caught up in it. As teenagers at summer camp, Lois and Lucy are on a canoe trip when Lucy “stepped sideways and disappeared from time” (151). Lois spends the rest of her life searching for a way to deal with this terrifying landscape, all the while carrying her friend’s existence around with her-along with almost overwhelming guilt concerning her part in Lucy’s disappearance.1 As an older adult, Lois feels compelled to collect landscape paintings. Her male friends, who see landscape as “commodity,” admire her as a shrewd art investor; however, her reason for collecting the paintings is to search for her lost friend in the landscape. “Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people
in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out” (129).
