Death By Landscape

“Death by Landscape” is a short story by Margaret Atwood, initially published in her 1991 collection Wilderness Tips. Atwood, who was born in Ottawa in 1939, has become one of Canada’s most celebrated writers over the course of a career that has spanned nearly six decades. As “Death by Landscape” demonstrates, Atwood’s nationality is not simply incidental to her writing, which comprises everything from poetry to literary criticism; Canadian history and culture feature prominently in much of Atwood’s work, and she played a key role in the development of a school of writing that would come to be known as “Southern Ontario Gothic.” As its name suggests, this school uses images and ideas associated with Gothic literature, such as insanity or the taboo, to explore different aspects of Canadian experience. “Death by Landscape” falls firmly into this genre, bringing Gothic tropes like suicide and supernatural threats to bear on the question of what it means to be a white, middle-class woman in 20th-century Canada.

Atwood’s story also touches on another distinctive feature of Canadian literature: the idea of survival. Atwood herself argued that this was the defining characteristic of Canadian writing in her 1972 work of criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature; in part because of Canada’s colonial history, and in part simply because of the harshness of its weather and terrain, Atwood argues that Canadian art and identity center on the struggle to stay alive.