Reading the ‘wordless unease’ in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Death by Landscape’

This article examines the way Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Death by Landscape’ (1991) engages with the representational strategies of Canada’s celebrated Group of Seven artists. I situate my reading of Atwood’s work first within aesthetics, focusing on her subtle problematization of the masculine ideology and wilderness aesthetic of the Group of Seven. I argue that Atwood unsettles the dominant, virulently male tradition of representation of the wilderness by uncovering an alternative female narrative through an ekphrastic engagement with the paintings. By doing so she not only dismantles the concept of wilderness both as a physical space that women have limited access to and as an imaginary construct; but at the same time she also reconfigures the structure and the content of wilderness stories, and in fact the concept of wilderness itself. Atwood offers a counter-discursive revision of the male adventure and maturation story by deconstructing and restructuring traditional narrative practices to render the female experience visible. This article hopes to show that Atwood expands the possibilities of the adventure story and wilderness writing and creates room for a female version of the maturation story with a fundamentally different aesthetic.