Margaret Atwood's Death By Landscape

The setting of the book begins at a summer camp in Prescott, Arizona called Box Canyon Boys Camp. This setting is important and adds meaning to the story because if it did not take place at the summer camp none of the main characters would have met each other, and the book would take place somewhere else.

Throughout the book, the author points out the lives of characters and what obstacles they go through which leads them to choose a different style of life by running away, giving up their

“You can’t understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes” is a saying that will always hold truth to it, even in this day and age. In Harper Lee’s, To Kill A Mockingbird, where two children are living in a racially segregated town in the 1930’s, this is demonstrated a lot. Through the use of point of view and coming of age, Lee proves that you can never understand how someone is feeling without imagining yourself in their perspective.

Lucy has these visions and feelings that make her call her mother back home, and tell her that she remembers the taste of her mother’s milk, and the thousands and many more kisses on her

Fear of intimacy, abandonment, and unstable sense of self begin to define Lois, the protagonist of “Death by Landscape,” after the tragic loss of her best friend, Lucy. Lois develops a sense of guilt after Lucy, her childhood friend from camp, goes missing, and never returns, leaving Lois at partial blame of what happens to Lucy in the woods that hot summer day.

As within the story the weather substituting in a role of a ‘desert’ is symbolizing Ellen feeling isolated and alone, she identifies it as a desert because people are unable to identify the location where they are currently living. The dust also acts as an isolating factor because the dust blocks them from their surroundings. “Look at it- look at it, you fool. Desert- the lamp lit at noon”.

The novel To Kill A Mockingbird is successful in delivering the story in a manner that captivates the audience. The story began by setting the scene, mood and also by introducing each character, which familiarized the reader with the environment. The author wrote the story in a manner that flowed with real life events of a time relative to the story, such as the segregation, racism and any financial struggles. It also did well to give each character a realistic mindset and reactions based on each person’s respective characterization. In a similar way, the story was written from the perspective of Scout, and the story was effectively narrated with the innocence and a lesser knowledge coming from someone of her age. Additionally, the story did a particularly good job at introducing details that were important to the story as it progressed so there were no surprises based on a sudden law change, for example. This aided in building the story to its climax, and other peaks of action. Each element to the story worked in sync to maneuver easily through the plot in a well thought out and executed story.

After children were returning home with bite marks on their neck being attacked by the “Bloofer Lady”, Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing soon realize that Lucy in truth is the “Bloofer Lady”. One of Lucy’s numerous roles as a Victorian woman was to care for the children, but her role as a Victorian woman is greatly changed in these scenes becoming evident to the reader. After being interrupted ,“With a careless motion, Lucy flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone” (p. 236). Additionally, Lucy’s constant sexual desires and beautiful looks work hand and hand with one another. Altering the tone of her voice and acting as if she was alive attracted Arthur to go towards his once loved wife, but Dr. Van Helsing disrupted her plan by flashing a cross near her. During this scene Lucy takes on the role of a Victorian man seducing Arthur about to

In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird a major theme is the loss of innocence. Whether from emotional abuse, racial prejudice or learning, Boo, Tom, and Scout all lose their innocence in one sense or another. The prejudice that each character endures leads to their loss. Through the responses of Boo, Tom, and Scout, Harper Lee shows how each character responded differently to their loss of innocence.

(Kincaid, 95) Since Lucy believes that her mother is a victim of a patriarchal system, she wants to disassociate herself from her mother and the submissiveness her mother represents. Just like the three sisters said: “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are.”

Again the description is bleak, (‘the sun beats .......the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.’ ) Life-giving water is again absent, (‘the dry stone no sound of water.’ ) And moving transversally forward to section 5 brings the reader into the desertscape where there is an intensification of the oppressiveness . The absence of water is emphasised through repetition:

Margaret Atwood’s “Death By Landscape” is a short story about the powerful of feelings guilt and regret. The author camouflages other underlying themes like fear and forgiveness by using the powerful landscapes in the Canadian wilderness.

Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” perfectly grasps the life-altering heartbreak that occurs after the loss of a child by utilizing literary devices such as imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor. In the poem, an image of a voyage is used to characterize a child’s journey from life to death. “The dangerous river”, is used as a metaphor to describe the birth canal which the child victoriously navigates, but after embarking upon the outside world, the child goes into a “voyage of discovery” (4) that results in his death in the river. “On a landscape stranger than Uranus” (14) emphasizes the estrangement felt by the mother without having any knowledge of the environment. Comparing it to Uranus she describes it to be just as strange as a another planet. In the ninth stanza, the mother reminisces the death of her child as she says, “My foot hit rock” (26) which is a representation that she has hit rock bottom and her life will now never be the same. The final simile of the poem, “I planted him in his country / like a flag” (28-29) identifies the relationship between the dead child and the land. It ties the mother to the land in a way that had not been thought of, a way that is fraught with grief. An extended metaphor is developed throughout the poem, comparing the experience of giving birth that the character had, to a river and its contents. It helps to understand the different stages of birth by expressing the hurricane of emotions, and incidents that occurred with the use of waves expressing times of difficulty and pain.

Death by Landscape is a short story, written by Margaret Atwood in 1990. The Author is a Canadian novelist, poet and essayist as well as an environmental activist and feminist with many national and international awards for her writings and activities. She was born in Ottawa, Canada and started to write when she was six years old. At the age of 16 she already knew that she wants to become a professional writer. She grew up in the outback of northern Quebec, maybe that’s the reason for her love to nature and northern environments and this is what builds the frame of most of her works. The story was first published in 1991 and is a part of

and Atwood mentions in her poem that “the lake is blue, the forest watchful.” (16). Therefore bringing forth the analogy that “In Atwood’s elegies, her attitude toward her father is generally loving and recuperative, but its is not without its moments of private conflict.” which are expressed through her poem (Jamieson).