Margaret Atwood’s classic short story accomplishes many things in a brief number of pages. With a tight and atmosphere focused narrative, it is a long shot of a life looking back, brought into focus by the memory of a haunting tragedy. That atmosphere is created in large part by the landscapes in which the story unfolds, the potential malevolence of which is boldly declared in the title.
Yet how does Atwood achieve this? The story itself is a mix of tropes. It is a seamless blending of mystery, coming of age, and horror, embedded throughout with Gothic themes and imagery created by the story’s natural settings. Nowhere are those themes more evident than they are in the landscapes and scenery Atwood uses to fill her narrative.
Under Atwood’s pen the landscapes in “Death by Landscape” become a bicameral threat, existing as both a threatening physical entity, as well as a haunted liminal space. This dual personification of Nature begins in the very first paragraph, and continues on as a major theme throughout the story, advancing narrative and anxiety while invoking the Gothic along the way.
The Woods are the Monster
With a narrative set in the wilds of the Great North, Atwood wastes no time in using the opening paragraph of Death by Landscape to begin personifying those horrors and threats that lay within.
“She is relieved not to have to worry about the lawn, or about the ivy pushing its muscular little suckers into the brickwork, or the squirrels gnawing their way into the attic and eating the insulation off the wiring, or about strange noises. This building has a security system, and the only plant life is in pots in the solarium.” (Atwood 28)
This first sentence is a contradiction, illustrating both the long and descriptive style that is often characteristic of Gothic texts, while also serving as an excellent example of Atwood’s use of specific words and imagery to maximize effect. Why should she have to worry? What is there to worry about, other than the “muscular little suckers” and the “squirrels gnawing” and the “strange noises”. In this single sentence Atwood takes the reader from general anxiety, to specific threat (a squirrel gnawing your wires and burning your house down), to the supernatural threat of things going bump in the night. It concludes with the reassurance that “the only plant life is in pots in the solarium”. Why would it be reassuring that the plants were contained, unless they needed to be because of whatever threat they posed. Generalized and unspecific dread, hallmarks of Gothic Literature, crawl their way through this sentence just like sucker vines.
Atwood’s descriptions of these landscapes only add to the growing dread. The characters exist within a “trackless wilderness” filled with “convoluted tree trunks”, one that hides from clear sight, existing “half-seen through the interlaced branches.” (Atwood 29) There is something hidden and out of sight. It is what Nick Groom called “unseen agencies” (Groom xv) in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. An entity existing just out of sight, maligning those who encounter it. The woods aren’t just haunted, they are the haunt.
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| (The Commencement of the Empire by Thomas Cole) |
The concept that the woods can exist as an entity with its own agency and ability to influence typifies the Gothic haunted forest trope. It also speaks directly to the root and breadth of what Gothic is. The word itself is derived from the Goths, barbarian tribes who were European contemporaries to the Roman Empire. One of these tribes was the Tervingi, later known as the Visigoths. Because they inhabited the thick forests of Eastern and Southern Europe, they were given the name Theruingi, which translated means “Forest People” (Groom 3). From the beginning the Gothic has had an association with a potentially malevolent Other, one so closely associated with the forests they inhabit that the forests themselves come to personify that same Other.
The Woods are a Neverending Trap
While working to personify the forests as a potentially malevolent entity, Atwood spends even more time painting a picture of a world where one miss-step might land one in another world from which they could never escape. Told as a reflection, Death by Landscape begins in the main character’s apartment, whose walls are crowded with paintings she has collected over time.
We are told that these paintings of nature scenes and landscapes are in fact “not landscape paintings”, because they lack the gentle and welcoming aspects those paintings possess.
“Instead there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path. There are no backgrounds in any of these paintings, no vistas; only a great deal of foreground that goes back and back, endlessly, involving you in its twists and turns of trees and branch and rock. No matter how far back in you go, there will be more.” (Atwood
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| (Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church) |
With the deftness of a vanishing act, Atwood transforms even representations of the landscapes in which the narrative unwinds into never ending liminal spaces one could fall into and never escape. A tangle and a maze that goes on forever. A bend in the trail that never ends. Just this sort of fate is hinted at when Atwood describes her characters reacting to the very paintings she herself had collected:
“She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. 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.” (Atwood 29)
This imagery and atmosphere conjures up another famous piece of Gothic Literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, whose main character becomes convinced there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper of her bedroom. Here Atwood presents an equally mysterious figure trapped in art, with the art itself serving as a symbol of the mysterious threats lurking in the real-world landscapes in which the narrative takes place.
We All end up in a Hole
One of the stories most powerful moments, one that relies heavily on the Gothic symbolism of Death, and Oblivion, comes near the end as the main character attempts to reconcile her own feelings and experiences with her reality:
“Maybe if they cut it all down, drained it all away, they might find Lucy’s bones… But a dead person is a body; a body occupies space, it exists somewhere. You can see it; you put it in a box and bury it… But Lucy is not in a box, or in the ground. Because she is nowhere definite, she could be anywhere.” (Atwood 39)
The ghost is a defining characteristic of the Gothic. While Atwood does not describe the ghost itself, here she gives her own definition of what it means to be haunted. To be left wondering through a lifetime of uncertainty regarding Death itself, a fate which strikes at the Gothic heart. Atwood uses both Death and the uncertainty surrounding it, each amplifying the other while exemplifying what it means to be Gothic. It is a Memento Mori, a reminder that not only does Death come for us all, but we never know where or how it will touch our lives.
Works Cited
Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Atwood, Margaret. “Death by Landscape.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 28–40.
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