Margaret Atwood's Death By Landscape

The passage from girl to woman often involves submitting to a patriarchal world-view. In Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape”, Lois is subjected to a masculine threshold in which she enters into adulthood by losing her femininity. Losing Lucy - her symbol of femininity - and coping with the loss of her disappearance, compels Lois to search for an explanation as to where Lucy, and her femininity, have gone.

Lucy is simultaneously a good friend, and a symbol of Lois’ femininity within the story. As Raschke claims, “Lucy represents… the possibilities of rebellion, of wildness, of a connection to nature that is not part of the patriarchal myth” (Raschke 77). Losing Lucy, represents Lois’ loss of possibility to rebel against the patriarchy. Now, Raschke also says that the woods are a representation “for transformation, albeit a masculine one” (73). However, in Atwood’s story, Lucy and Lois are sent into the woods for their transition from girl to woman. Losing Lucy in this masculine setting symbolizes the loss of femininity in a woman’s transition into adulthood.

The idea that part of her being can be lost in indefinite space is hard for Lois to understand. In the short story, Lois has to mourn nothing as Lucy “is nowhere definite” (Atwood 117); she has no body to bury, nor any explanation as to where Lucy went. Without a tangible ending to Lucy’s story, Lois has a hard time rationalizing the events of her transition into adulthood. As well, losing her sense of femininity allows the opposing forces of masculinity to take over her life, without opposition: Lois submits to the stereotypical roles of an adult female and marries a man and raises two sons. Yet, at the end of the story, her roles of mother and wife have been fulfilled, so Lois is free to search for her lost femininity as the opposing masculine forces in her life have been