Framed Identity: Finding Lucy in Atwood's "Death by Landscape"

Author(s): DEBRAH RASCHKE

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , September 2012, Vol. 45, No. 3
(September 2012), pp. 65-80
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030695

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Atwooďs "Death by Landscape" is a multi-layered tale linking a young girl's disappearance to the death of Tom

Thomson, a Canadian painter who inspired the Group of Seven. The paintings from the Group, which frame the

camp narrative within which Lucy vanishes, are also associated with the virility ideology that Atwood subverts.

Framed Identity:
Finding Lucy in Atwood's
"Death by Landscape"

DEBRAH RASCHKE

mers together paddling canoes, swimming, and hiking: they are camp buddies.
In mers On theiAtwood' s theing rtogether
r last outi togetherwhilaesthik"Death
ing up theoutitraingl paddl
to LookingOutbyPoitogether
nt, Lucy Landscape," canoes, while swimming, two hiking young up and girls, the hiking: Lois trail and to they Look Lucy, are Out spend camp Point, five buddies. sum- Lucy
vanishes without explanation. That indeed is the mystery that haunts Lois for the rest
of her life - so much so that she collects landscape paintings that actually portray the
wooded scene where her friend disappears. Noting the "pinkish island, in the lake,
with the intertwisted trees," Lois reflects that it is the "same landscape they paddled
through, that distant summer" (117).
Hardly a simple tale, though, Atwood's "Death by Landscape" is highly nuanced
and layered. Lois's landscape paintings, referenced in the beginning and at the end,
suggest that the power of representation is essential to this story. After all, it is land-
scape that kil s, not nature itself. All the artists represented in Lois's collection, except

Mosaic 45/3 0027-1 276-07/0650 16$02.00©Mosaic

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66 Mosaic 4 5/3 ( September 2012)

for David Milne, are part of a Canadian group of painters, the Group of Seven, and
its usually noted inspiration, Tom Thomson, features heavily in this story.1 The mys-
tery surrounding Thomson's disappearance and death, the uncertainties surrounding
his remains, and the woods with which he became so associated all resonate in the
mystery surrounding Lucy's disappearance, thus linking Lucy to Tom Thomson, but
with a twist. With the exception of the brief commentary on Lois s condominium,
Lois's collection frames "Death by Landscape." Between this framing are Lois's mem-
ories of summer camp, where the gendered camp rituals function as an odd inverted
puberty initiation rite in which the Manitou girls learn to be "braves," not "squaw[s]"
(108). The artwork thus frames a memory of a transformative camp experience that
privileges the masculine. Yet literary and visual frames further intertwine, with the
artwork (mostly from the Group of Seven) also reinforcing the masculine - this time
through a depiction of a northern virility that becomes inextricable from an identity
that is defined by gender. Calling attention to the power of myth and art to confine
and transform possible experiences, "Death by Landscape" shatters patriarchal repre-
sentation by linking Lucy to both Tom Thomson and to a landscape that ultimately
becomes connected distinctly to a subversive female identity.
Most previous readings of Atwood's tale have insightfully focused on how repre-
sentations of nature are linked to a labyrinthine image of Canadian cultural
identity - one that is colonized and feminine and another that is imperialistic and
masculine. As Eva Mackey notes, the Group of Seven, the Canada First Movement,
and Northrop Frye attempted to throw off the shackles of European influence by forg-
ing a new association with a "virile" Canadian North. Such an association, however,
ignores the indigenous populations who once occupied that land. Commenting on
what she calls a settler mentality in Atwood's "Death by Landscape," Mackey queries:
"Would being lost in the 'unknown territory' of the wilderness be a central metaphor
for Indigenous writers?" ( 129). Coral Ann Howells observes how the Canadian wilder-
ness mythology is both a rejection of European colonization and an enactment of col-
onization, since the concept of the wilderness was produced by those who settled
Canada and wrote about those settlements ("Writing" 10). Faye Hammill places the
story within the post-colonial gothic by connecting "Death by Landscape" with The
Journals of Susanna Moodiet where the settler's image of nature as "freedom and
adventure" gives way to a "hostile, haunted, and horrifying" forest (59). Thus, for
Hammill, those elements are the "unseen presences" or the "ghosts of empire" peer-
ing through Lois's paintings (58-59). Also suggesting an imperialistic critique of
empire, Lauren Rule sees Lucy as becoming conflated with the Indian she pretends to
play - that in moving outside the parameters of the story, Lucy becomes symbolic for

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 Debrah Rasch ke 67

the vanishing and displacement of Aboriginal peoples (640-41). These vestiges of a

vanquished Other thus identify for Hammill and Rule the source of the "wordless
unease" that the paintings evoke in Lois ("Death" 100).
However, the paintings evoke more than mere discomfort. By the end of the
story, the paintings produce "a shout of recognition, or joy" (118), suggesting that
Lois herself "may be joyously transformed" (457). Lois concludes, "Every one of them
is a picture of Lucy." This rediscovery of Lucy is full of life, almost mystical - "charged
with violent color" (118). If indeed the paintings primarily suggest only the traces of
an uncomfortable imperialism, it is difficult to ascertain why this representation has
morphed from unease to ultimate joy. Indeed, the questions asked in several critical
contexts, "Who is Lucy?" and "What is it that so haunts Lois?," are decidedly key to
Atwood's story.
The landscape with which Lucy becomes indistinguishable serves as both a his-
torical and cultural referent. The narrator tells us that the camp no longer exists ( 101 ).
Nevertheless, there are, in actuality, at least two current Camp Manitous in southern
Canada. One, founded in 1959, still exists in Parry Sound on Georgian Bay. The other
exists in Belleville, Ontario, the same town to which Susanna Moodie moved after her
stay in the bush - and in this, Hammill is astute in observing the story's connection
to Atwood s former work. What "Death by Landscape" shares most with The Journals
of Susanna Moodie , though, is the concept of nature represented - a representation that
creates a reality of its own. Atwood notes in Survival that "Nature poetry is seldom just
about Nature; it is usually about the poet's attitude toward the external natural universe"
(emph. Atwood s). Thus, "landscapes" are "often interior landscapes" - "maps of a state
of mind" (59). As the title of Atwood's story makes clear, what is under scrutiny here
is not nature, but landscape - nature represented. The question then becomes: How
is it that landscape (representation) can kill?
And that is how Lois's paintings come into play. Mostly associated with the Group
of Seven, Lois's paintings include "two Tom Thomsons, three A.Y. Jacksons, a Lawren
Harris," as well as an Arthur Lismer, a J.E.H. MacDonald, and a David Milne ( 100). The
landscapes painted by the Group of Seven are varied: the Arctic North, the Georgian
Bay, the hills north of Montreal, Newfoundland, British Columbia, Quebec, the
Rockies, Halifax, Toronto, and Algonquin Park. It is Algonquin Park, though, that res-
onates in this story more than any other geographical location. The scene where Lucy
disappears is woods - not tundra, and it is wild - not the offshoot of a bay. Moreover,
the woods depicted in the story are mostly likely close to Toronto, thus eliminating the
far-too-distant British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. More importantly,
Algonquin Park is the only landscape that all of the painters in Lois's collection

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68 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012 )

painted. It is also noteworthy that Atwood has been seemingly careful not to make this
entirely about the Group of Seven, for Lois's collection also includes a painting by
David Milne, not associated with this group. In one of his studies on Milne, art his-
torian David Silcox notes Milne's retort to the queries regarding his association with
the Group of Seven. Milne's response was that he is "a member of the Group of One"
( David 9). Silcox further notes that in his early years, Milne painted in various places.
In particular, his watercolours (flourished in pastel as well as black and white designs)
stood in stark contrast to the bold colours that distinguished the Group of Seven
(Painting 165). His two connections with the Group of Seven were his love of the
wilderness and his painting of Baptiste Lake, located near the south-east border of
Algonquin Park. After 1948, as Silcox notes, nearly all Milne's paintings were of
Baptiste Lake ( David 59).
Thus, it is Algonquin Park, located approximately 170 miles (300 kilometres)
north of Toronto, that is most likely the site of Lucy's disappearance. A rugged topog-
raphy of a 7,000-square-kilometre wilderness that harbours both deciduous trees and
conifers, Algonquin Park sports hundreds of lakes that spill into other lakes, spruce
bogs, and cliffs (Algonquin) - very much like the wilderness depicted in the travelogues
that Lois peruses of the country where she spent that fated summer: "Lake after lake,
random blue puddles in dark green bush, the trees like bristles" (117). The birds noted
in the story, the totems for the camp initiates - chickadees, blue jays, ravens, and
kingfishers - are, as well, native to Algonquin Park (see Strickland). Moreover,
Algonquin Park is the scene where Tom Thomson (frequently credited with inspiring
the Group of Seven) both lived and worked. Memorialized on his cairn as "living pas-
sionately with the wild," Thomson found his primary inspiration in this park. Perhaps
most importantly, it is the scene where Thomson mysteriously died, making the sub-
ject of his life a legend (Atwood, Strange 22). Sherill Grace notes that "Tom Thomson,
the historical person, has been transformed into a corporeal (and pigmented) site of
inscription, of a spectral body on which Canadian biographers, autobiographers, art
historians, visual artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, song writers, and filmmakers
write their versions of (his) identity - private and public, individual and national"
(8). In other words, myth and history become inseparable.
Nearly all the paintings of Algonquin Park by the Group of Seven predate Thomson's
death. As Silcox notes, for the Group of Seven, "Tom Thomson was Algonquin Park."
Without Thomson, "there was nothing except memories" (Group 213, emph. Silcox's).
Only Lawren Harris returned to paint in Algonquin Park after Thomson died (Hill
80). Just as Algonquin Park became Tom Thomson for the Group of Seven, all of
Lois's landscape paintings become associated with Lucy. And as Thomson in various

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 Debrah Raschke 69

cultural accounts becomes indistinguishable from the wilderness where he died, so

too does Lucy. The tribute on Thomson's memorial cairn conveys how he was
"brother to all untamed things in nature" and how nature "took him to itself at last."
Thomson is described as being so thoroughly absorbed by nature that there are no
traces left of his being. The same can be said of Lucy.
In fact, the mystery of Thomson s disappearance seems to haunt "Death by
Landscape," just as Lucy seems to haunt Lois's memory. As Karen Stein comments, it is
noteworthy that Thomson dies on a canoe trip (142). In this light, Lucys unexplain-
able disappearance prompts several speculations: Did Lucy commit suicide? Did she
slip and fall? Did she and Lois get in a fight? Was she murdered - did Lois push her?
Where is Lucy? As Lois speculates, a body has to be "somewhere" (117), but there is no
trace of Lucy. Likewise, Thomson's death, ruled as an accidental drowning, prompted
similar speculations: Was it suicide? Did he simply slip and fall out of his canoe? Did
he get into a fight? Did the fishing line wrapped meticulously sixteen or seventeen
times around Thomson s left leg and the gash on the head suggest murder (Davies 98,
Little 57-58)?2 Whether Thomson was murdered or not probably will never be known,
but enough suspicious details exist to have created an entire mythology surrounding
his disappearance and subsequent mysterious burial. As Atwood comments in Strange
Things, Thomson was hardly a candidate for drowning. He was "an experienced
woodsman" who "was in the habit of going off for long trips, by himself, to paint" (22).
This too furthers the similarities with Atwood s "Death by Landscape." No one is con-
cerned about Lucy and Lois when they head off for Look Out Point. Both Lois and
Lucy are considered to be "old hands" (111). Thus, the question remains for both mys-
teries: What really happened to Tom Thomson? What really happened to Lucy?
In this light, it is important to examine the peculiar details surrounding the
events of Thomson's death and how some of the circumstances emerge subtly in
Atwood's story. On 8 July 1917, Thomson set out on a fishing expedition. That same
day, one of the residents, Martin Bletcher, with whom Thomson purportedly had a
testy relationship, saw an upturned canoe but did not report it until the following day,
at which point it was identified as Thomson's (Little 45-47). Remarking that an
"upturned canoe is usually the result of misadventure, poor canoemanship, or excep-
tionally rough water conditions" and that it "is always worth investigating," William
Little suggests that Bletcher's omission is telling (46). It is even more telling given the
calm weather that July day and given Thomson's expertise with canoes. When the
body was found with blood and bruises a week later, serious decomposition had
already set in. There was a brief inquest and then a burial at the north shore of Canoe
Lake on 17 July - just one day after Thomson's body had been identified (Davies 97).

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7 0 Mosaic 4 5/3 ( September 2012)

The Thomson mystery is further complicated by Thomson's family, who

demanded less than twenty-fours after Thomson's burial at Canoe Lake that his body
be moved to Leith, the family home. In a subsequent midnight excursion, in which the
presiding undertaker declared he wanted only a lantern, a crowbar, and a shovel,
Thomson's body was supposedly exhumed, placed in a metal casket, and moved to
Leith. Whether the body was moved or whether the undertaker simply shoveled loose
dirt into the casket is still not known (Little 84-90). The question remains: Where is
Tom Thomson - at Canoe Lake, at Leith, somewhere else? Where is Lucy? As Lois
speculates, "But a dead person is a body; a body occupies space, it exists somewhere"
(117). Forty years later, Little and a group of friends were so plagued by this question
that they attempted to exhume Thomson s grave at Canoe Lake. They found nothing
but a pine box under a nearby spruce. A Toronto anatomy professor determined that
the exhumed bones were those of an Indian or half-breed (84-90). It was further
noted of the exhumed body that no items of clothing were found: "No buttons, belt
buckle or other metal articles were found in the casket" (164). Likewise, in speculat-
ing on the whereabouts of Lucy's bones, Lois comments: "Maybe if they cut it all
down, drained it all away, they might find Lucy's bones, some time, wherever they are
hidden. A few bones, some buttons, the buckle from her shorts" (117): buttons and
belt buckle - the exact same items noted as missing in the exhumed casket. Thus, in
the conjectures surrounding Lucy's disappearance (suicide, foul play, accident) as well
as in the strange absence of a body and the named absence of clothing items, Tom
Thomson's story haunts Lucy's vanishing.
However, Thomson's life story, although central to Lucy's own, is still only part
of the riddle that occupies "Death by Landscape." Another part belongs to the paint-
ings that depict the landscape in which Lucy disappeared. It is mostly Thomson's
work and selected works by members of the Group of Seven that frame the central
narrative of the Camp Manitou section. Thus their aesthetics, which became associ-
ated with cultural identity, are worth noting. Renowned for making Canada a subject
of their work, the Group of Seven attempt to make depictions of nature specifically
Canadian. Commenting on her collection, Lois notes that her paintings "are not land-
scape paintings" since "there aren't any landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy
European sense, with a gentle hill, a curving river, a cottage, a mountain in the back-
ground, a golden evening sky." What is conveyed instead is wilderness - "a tangle, a
receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path"
(117-18). The "Not European" is significant in that it was a kind of mantra for
Thomson and the Group of Seven. For the Group of Seven, painting Canadian land-
scapes was an attempt to break with European traditions in order to create an art that

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 Debrah Raschke 7 1

was unequivocally Canadian (Housser 17) - what Howells in her essay in Various
Atwoods describes as a solitary and unpeopled wilderness (62). More specifically, the
Group of Sevens landscapes reflect a rebellion against the "framed and controlled
nature" of English landscape painting and subsequently against a European way of
seeing the world (Mackey 126-27).
That the collection primarily comprises paintings by members of the Group of
Seven might lead one to believe that Atwood's story makes the Group of Seven the key
focal point, particularly in its allusions to the tangled and wild landscape that defies
the tamed depictions of nature in European landscape paintings. Although part of the
story, the text turns again. Lois also owns a painting by David Milne (not a member
of the Group of Seven), and she owns paintings by only specific members of the
Group of Seven. Thus, I would argue that it is the work by certain members of the
Group of Seven and Milne's wilderness connection to the Group of Seven that
become the palimpsest. Of those included in the Group of Seven, Lois does not own
any paintings by Fred Varley (known best for his portraits) or Frank Johnston, who,
as Silcox observes, became highly critical of the Group of Seven shortly after it was
formed ( Group 19, 76). Nor does she own paintings by Frank Carmichael, known best
for his portrayals of rural Toronto (Newlands 40). That these members of the Group
of Seven are not part of Lois's collection is revealing. Their primary focus is some-
thing other than the landscape that Lois and Lucy "paddled through" during "that dis-
tant summer" (117) - something other than Canadian wilderness, the representation
of which is pivotal in this story.
In contrast, Lois does own paintings by A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur
Lismer, Tom Thomson, and Lawren Harris, who all made the wilderness their pri-
mary subject from 1914 to 1917, when Algonquin Park became, in Silcox's words, a
"favorite painting ground" ( Group 210). Although Atwood ultimately critiques the
wilderness aesthetic associated with the Group of Seven, she nevertheless acknowl-
edges that it wields considerable attraction and power. Moreover, the paintings col-
lectively accentuate what Atwood so pervasively argues in Strange Things - that real
events and places frequently are inseparable from the mysteries and evolving legends
that surround them, thus creating a reality of their own. A.Y. Jackson, although influ-
enced by Impressionism, reflects a realistic bent in the Algonquin paintings - an aim
"to record the landscape before him and reveal Canada to Canadians" ("A.Y"). For
example, the shadow of the maple tree, the trees in the foreground, the bordering
fence, and the distant farmhouse in Jacksons famous The Edge of the Maple Wood
evoke a clear sense of familiarity. Jackson represents that tendency in Atwooďs aes-
thetics that is never too far away from the real. MacDonald, Lismer, Thomson, and

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7 2 Mosaic 4 5/3 ( September 2012)

Harris, in contrast, were fascinated by what lay beneath that recorded landscape. In
Thomson's Autumn's Garland, for example, the depicted trees are less distinct trees
than they are a rush of blended reds and oranges amid a play of light. In The Group
of Seven and Tom Thomson , Silcox observes the "mystery embedded in the rawness of
nature" that "touched a nerve for Harris and for MacDonald" (18) and the "sense of
a hidden presence behind the landscapes" that characterizes Thomson's paintings
(212). MacDonald believed that nature provides a conduit to the spirit in ways simi-
lar to those explored by Whitman and Thoreau (Mellen 25). Lismer's designs are
sometimes described as having an "epic spirit" to them, as possessing a kind of "alle-
gory" (Housser 181) - just as "Death by Landscape" functions as a mythic allegory,
complete with references to the Grail. In particular, Lawren Harris saw the physical
landscape as imbued with spiritual meaning. Housser describes Harris as a "modern
mystic" who attempted to convey a mystical experience or moment of eternity
through his paintings (191). Indeed, interested in the Theosophical Movement,
Harris attempted to reveal the divine in nature. For Harris, "the role of the artist and
the function of art" was "to reveal the divine forces in nature" (Mellen 146). In this
light, the aesthetics of Thomson, MacDonald, Lismer, and Harris reflect Atwood's
propensity to read beneath the surface - to unearth the power of myth that so fre-
quently underlies historical and cultural events. Thus, Lois's collection dramatizes a
tension between the real and something beyond the real - the attempt to depict an
actual (Algonquin Park) and the attempt to capture its underlying spirit - trees that
are "hardly trees," "currents of energy charged with violet color" (118).
This wilderness, with its mythic and transformative allure, however, is not with-
out complications. As both Howells and Mackey observe, this unruly wilderness so
frequently depicted by the Group of Seven is very much a masculine aesthetic. As
Howells comments in her essay in Various Atwoods, this aesthetic is "a male narrative
of silent wilderness" (62). Referencing Jonathan Bordo's work on the Group of Seven,
Howells in "Writing Wilderness" observes that this masculine narrative is frequently
depicted through an accentuated subject, such as a single tree in the foreground (11).
Mackey places this masculine within a historical context. Citing Robert Grant
Haliburton's 1869 speech "We Are the Northmen of the New World," Mackey notes
how "northern" came to symbolize the " masculine virtues of 'energy, strength, self-
reliance, health, and purity,'" while "southern was equated with 'decay and effeminacy,
even libertinism and disease'" (126, emph. Mackey's). Thomson was the epitome of
this masculine aesthetic. In Inventing Tom Thomson, Grace discusses at length the
myth of masculinity surrounding Thomson. Grace notes that "his persistent associa-
tion with 'the North'" is invariably linked to his "masculine intimacy with nature (a

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 Debrah Raschke 73

feminized 'bush' or 'wild')" (9-10). And much of the myth that surrounds him res
on the "phallic implements of paddle, rod, and brush" (58).

Representations
masculinemasculine one.more
one. Perhaps of Perhaps the wilderness
importantly more
for Atwood's importantly
story, as Howellsthus become for Atwood's a site for story, transformation, as Howells suggests, albeit a
suggests,
the idea of the wilderness as an opportunity for a transformative experience has been
"endlessly replayed and reinforced as popular cultural myth through summer camp
and lakeside cottage scenarios right up to the present day" ("Writing" 10). In Strange
Things, Atwood identifies this escape into the wilderness and this "playing Indian" as
part of the Ernest Thomson Seton mythology in which "non-Natives" turn themselves
into "Natives" in an attempt to find a "new life" (43). Thus, the Camp Manitou section
of Atwood's story was a common practice in Ontario summer camps throughout the
1950s (56). Noting that instructional manuals such as Seton s The Red Book: Or, How
to Play Indian were common household readings, Sharon Wall observes that this phe-
nomenon of "playing Indian" was less a game of dress-up than it was an attempt to
escape modernity, to hearken back to a less complicated era. It was an attempt, in
essence, to create a distance between the camp experience and the alienation pro-
duced by urban culture (518-21) - to which Lucy in Atwood's story does not want to
return. Thinking about returning to Chicago, Lucy muses, "It would be nice not to go
back" (110). Camp founders envisioned this "break with city life" as a needed phe-
nomenon, which then materialized into a much romanticized vision of Aboriginal
cultures (Wall 518-20). As Atwood observes in Strange Things, Seton's version of
"going Native," which included "dressing up, the adoption of 'Indian names,' the play-
ing of games, the singing of songs," induced a "great many children, over the space of
fifty years" to "believe that they were metaphorically Indian" (56). The entire "mater-
ial culture of the camp" would be transformed into "Indian villages," complete with
totem poles and teepees, and the campers themselves then would be frequently
"renamed" with Ojibwa, Algonquin, Cree, and Blackfoot names (Wall 521).
Likewise, "Manitou" in "Death by Landscape" is an Indian name attributed to the
Algonquin tribe that, along with the Ojibwa tribe, once occupied Algonquin Park. This
likeness of "playing Indian" in "Death by Landscape" is unmistakable: the circle or
council ring where a ceremony takes place (the circle where the girls are holding hands
and singing); the special insignia or donning of war paint that denotes rank (the
"three-fingered claw marks" that were really red lipstick streaks across the face - three
for Cappie, two for the counselors, and one for the initiates); the ceremonial drums
(the fake tom-toms, whose sounds were "heavy and fast like a sacred heart beat"); the
headgear (the "frazzled-ended feathers" that Cappie sticks in her bandana); and,

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 7 4 Mosaic 4 5/3 ( September 2012)

finally, Cappie herself, rechristened as Chief Cappeosota, wrapped in her "red-and-

black Hudson Bay blanket" (107). Complicated and ultimately fraudulent, this desire
for "going Native," for being "real" or "authentic" ( Strange 66), still wields consider-
able power. There is a desire to find "Manitou," which means the spirit that pervades
everything (see Benton-Banai). This is precisely the dilemma Lois expresses in her
childhood desire "to be adventurous, and pure, and aboriginal" (107) and in her ret-
rospective reservations regarding the practice. Ultimately she finds it "disquieting,"
knowing full well that there is something inauthentic about the exercise, that it is a
"form of stealing" (107) - a kind of cultural appropriation. It is, as Howells suggests
in her essay in Various Atwoodsy both "Eurocentered" and "spiritual" (62).
Also significant is the gender twist that emerges in Atwood's portrayal of these
summer camps. The Ontario girls' camps, in actuality, encouraged weaving, painting,
and a "world of quiet feet.'" The boys' camps, in contrast, most frequently bore a kind
of "violent hyper masculinity" in which boys were encouraged "to indulge their 'sav-
age' impulses in games of 'scalping' with 'blood-curdling yells'" (Wall 522). Cappie is
very specific in her instructions for the canoe journey: "You go on big water [. . .] You
go many moons [. . .] You bring back much wampum [. . .] Do good in war, my braves,
and capture many scalps" (107-08). Lois reflects on how they are supposed to be
"boys" and "bloodthirsty," acknowledging that it is "a game" that "cannot be played by
substituting the word 'squaw.'" This "would not work at all" (108). Likewise, Atwood
in Strange Things is very specific about the gendering of wilderness activities. This
journeying into the wilderness and "playing Indian" historically was solely a mascu-
line purview - "Indian women were not warriors" (111).

The ining
iningquestion the literature
the literature of the then becomes:
Canadian North,of Atwood
the Canadian Why Things
in Strange this North, inversion
explains that Atwood of traditional in Strange gender Things roles? explains In exam- that
there were no female explorers who roamed the Arctic North in search of the
Northwest Passage - no "female Franklins" and no women " becoming an Indian" (111-
12, emph. Atwood's). Thus, in having the Manitou girls take on these masculine roles,
Atwood is going against the grain of Canadian cultural and mythic traditions in which
the active (male) participants in the nature quest story are either victims of a "demonic
ice-goddess who will claim" the unwary adventurer "for her own," as in the Franklin
Expedition or failed seekers, who, in attempting to become Indian, look to nature as a
"repository of salvation and new life," as in "The Grey Owl Syndrome" (43).
However, a simple inversion of roles in Atwood's oeuvre is hardly ever the
answer. Notably, Sharon Wilson comments in Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual
Politics that Atwood's deconstructed mythic intertexts allow "the muted or silenced

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 Debrah Raschke 7 5

subtext to speak" and thus provide a conduit for a re-visioning of a new "sexual pol-
itics" that moves beyond the confining parameters of old inherited stories (31). And
it is this dramatization of the confining parameters of old inherited stories that
emerges in the twists and turns of the oddly inverted puberty initiation that occurs at
the summer camp. Most girls presumably begin camp as Lois does at age nine and
then culminate their experience four years later at approximately age thirteen. (Lois is
thirteen when Lucy, having just had her first period, disappears.) That Lucy disap-
pears shortly after having her first period suggests that whatever transformation
occurs is connected to a kind of puberty initiation, one signaling entry into a pre-
scribed sexuality that proclaims a fundamental distinction between male and female,
with boys learning boy rules and girls learning girl rules. What the Manitou girls
learn, however, are the boy rules - an initiation into male puberty in which the cul-
minating ritual is a canoe trip into the wilderness. Such a journey stages what Stephen
Larsen in his discussion of male initiation rites defines as the "male confrontation

with the external field," in which journeys "partake of blood and danger" and engage
the "battle and the hunt" (35). Although Atwood's Camp Manitou includes the femi-
nine enterprises of arts and crafts, its activities are primarily masculine. In addition to
the clear male-identified "wampum"-scalp-'em adventure, other Manitou activities
are also stereotypically masculine. The girls at Camp Manitou are encouraged not to
have "quiet feet," but to participate in "rowdy singsongs" in which they are "expected
to yell in order to show" that they are "enjoying" themselves, and to engage in "loud
shouting and the banging of spoons on the tables" in "ritual intervals" (101-03). Even
the names sound masculine: "Cappie, Skip, or Scottie" (101).
Further accentuating the idea of initiation is the "sort of totemie clan system"
that defines the progression through the various bird stages (103). That some names
in this totem system are acceptable while others are not (vultures, skunks, and rats are
taboo) indicates a certain power or symbolic meaning residing in the name, even
though the historical accuracy of Indian naming was almost always "quite literally
made up" - like "Camp Wanna-com-bak" (Wall 523-24). Note too that "Cappie is
never one to be much concerned with consistency or with archeology" (108).
Interestingly enough, though, the totems that demarcate the girls' ages are all birds
and in the Ojibwa tradition the members of the Bird Clan are seen as spiritual lead-
ers known for their intuition and knowledge (Benton-Banai 76). Thus this totemie
progression suggests as well a kind of spiritual quest. The girls at Camp Manitou
begin as Chickadees or fledglings. It is a beginning of a journey. They then progress
to Bluejays, which, according to some lore, are connected to the trickster figure and to
a kind of playfulness (Leonard and McClure 250). The Raven, the most well-known

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7 6 Mosaic 45/3 ( September 2012)

of the mythic totems, is a transformer and a trickster that frequently achieves its ends
through disguises (311). It is frequently also a harbinger of death. In the hero-
trickster cycle, the Raven achieves transformation by stealing and, according to some
lore, decides which people will or will not return to life. It is during the Raven stage
that Lucy first gets her period and then disappears. Lois notes their beginnings as
Ravens: after they "had graduated from Bluejays and entered Ravens," Lucy "got her
period, right in the first week of camp" (105). Lucy's response to this transformation
is to burn her sanitary napkin - the "white fluff [singeing] and the blood [sizzling],"
producing a "deep satisfaction," as if "some wordless ritual had been fulfilled" (106).
Shortly afterward, Lucy is gone. The last phase is the Kingfishers. As an anagram,
Kingfisher has clear associations with the Fisher King of the Grail legend, which
promises, through the healing of the Fisher King, a returned prosperity and spiritual
healing. Thus, Lois and Lucy begin in the symbolic phase of a search for truth.
However, their journey ends not with transformation, but with a state that bodes
death and loss: what is lost is a subversive female subjectivity that is stolen by an
indoctrination of masculine wilderness ideology.
Initiation journeys have as their purpose the transformation of the participant,
and camp experience is no different. The girls who went to Camp Manitou - those
who are "good at it" - are indeed transformed, even visibly changed. Lois reflects how
she "can recognize women who went to these camps, and were good at it." There is a
"hardness to their handshakes," a "way of standing, legs planted firmly and farther
apart than usual," a "way of sizing you up, to see if youd be any good in a canoe" (101).
They have, in essence, incorporated a masculine sensibility. Lois too has changed. She
is "tired a lot" (117) - just like Lucy before she disappears (106). She has gone through
life not "paying full attention" - a bit like Lucy, who is careless with details and time.
She has become haunted, "as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and
another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized - the
life of what would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared
from time" (117). And in losing Lucy, Lois has become terrified of the wild.
Cappie's send-off into the wilderness ends with a bugle playing "taps," which, as
Lois notes, "does not sound very Indian" (108). It does denote, though, an ending -
an ending of a day, an event, or a life - or, one might say, a particular view of life. One
of Lucy's last acts is the burning of her sanitary napkin in some "wordless ritual."
Something is lost at Camp Manitou in this strangely inverted totemie puberty initia-
tion. Puberty rites, by definition, signal passage from one liminal stage into another.
According to anthropologist Frank Young, male initiation, though, is much more than
"learning how to hunt or plow, how to take heads, or how to deal with women." It is

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 Debrah Raschke 77

instead learning how "to view the world from the adult male standpoint" (30). I
learning an attitude. It is a passing from the profane into the sacred that requires
death of the self associated with this previous world. It means learning to regard
woman as inferior, as the uninitiated, and as the profane (Eliade 9-10).
And that is what is conveyed at the camp - an attitude that privileges the masc
line. In Western mythology, the quest itself belongs to men, and thus so does spirit
transformation - the culmination of the quest. One of the quest's many obstacles
invariably the resistance of the wiles of the wayward woman, usually envisioned a
temptress, monster, abyss - or, in the Canadian version, as "ice-goddess." Only the pur
(usually dead) woman is idolized. Look at the songs at Camp Manitou: "My Darl
Clementine," "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean," "Alouette" - all about dead women
a dead lark with a pretty, feminine-sounding name. If this is indeed the masculine per
spective conveyed, it is no wonder that Lucy burns her sanitary napkin.
In her reminiscences, Lois reflects how she can hardly remember "having her t
boys in the hospital, nursing them as babies," can "hardly remember getting marri
( 1 17) - traditional rites of passage for women. But this is not the subject of this stor
What "Death by Landscape" emphasizes is a far deeper problem inherent in a pa
archal ideology that erases female subjectivity. Atwood's story, in essence, queries
process of representation in which this erasure ensues. This patriarchal ideology
implicit in the mythology of the summer camps in which the culminating transf
mational experience is couched explicitly in masculine terms, and it is implicit in
virile wilderness mythology associated with Lois's paintings that frame the ca
experience. The story and the frame, in effect, are not all that different. And it is th
power of this representation that is essential to Atwood's story. How can a wom
have a spiritual connection to a wilderness, real or represented, when the paramet
of that experience are defined solely in masculine terms?
Ruminating on this landscape where Lucy disappeared - on the "intertwist
trees" that give way to "lake after lake," on the "random blue puddles" that recall Luc
large blue eyes - Lois longs not only for Lucy, but also for what Lucy represents in h
self: the possibilities of rebellion, of wildness, of a connection to nature that is n
part of patriarchal myth. What she wants is the wilderness, a wilderness mythol
that was once assimilated into herself. Luce Irigaray encapsulates Lois's dilemma w
in her discussion of the cultural killing of female subjectivity: "Mourning nothin
the most difficult [. . .] I search for myself, as if I had been assimilated into malen
(9). In musing over Lucy's disappearance toward the end of the story, Lois thin
about a "shadowy life" that "would not let itself be realized" (117) - Lucy who bre
all the rules and rolls her eyes at authority.3

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7 8 Mosaic 4 5/3 ( September 2012)

Occupying the centre of Atwooďs story, the Camp Manitou section of "Death by
Landscape" is framed by the landscape paintings, which is to suggest that the narra-
tive of Lucy's disappearance (or the disappearance of a rebellious female subjectivity)
is framed as well. That disappearance so permeates mythic traditions that it becomes
unquestioningly the way we see the world. In response, Atwood queries in Strange
Things what happens "when women enter the northern landscape, either as authors,
or as female or male protagonists created by women authors" (108, emph. Atwood's).
What happens when women enter the virile northland that so marked the Group of
Seven s virile aesthetics? Atwood asks: "So what sort of women - if any - did end up
in the woods, and live to tell the tale - or to have the tale told about them?" (117,
emph. Atwood's). It would change the representation of those woods, so that the con-
struction of the feminine associated with the woods is no longer some romanticized
ideal or some devouring ice-goddess. And that is exactly what occurs in this story - a
woman associated with the woods is having a tale told about her.
The many intertexts of this story twist and turn, like the "intertwisted trees" in
one of Lois's paintings. The "pinkish" hue of one of the paintings referenced at the
beginning and at the end most likely doubles as both a reference to Lucy and to one
of Thomsons actual paintings in pink hues ( Algonquin Park , Pink Birches , or Evening ,
Canoe Lake), thus once again accentuating the importance of Thomson and the
wilderness mythology with which he becomes associated. At the end of the story,
when Lois sees Lucy "crouching beneath the overturned canoe," she peers beyond the
paintings into an imaginary wilderness in which the most notable overturned canoe
in this context belongs to the legendary Thomson, whose mysterious death by acci-
dent, suicide, or murder parallels Lucy's. What Lois sees peering from behind that
overturned canoe, though, is not the masculine wilderness embodied by Thomson
("paddle, rod, and brush"), but a wilderness transformed. It is a wilderness with Lucy
in it - Lucy, who is associated with a libertine South, or what Haliburton disparag-
ingly labelled the effeminate. What Lois sees and what gives her joy is a landscape with
a subversive female subjectivity reconfigured into it. It thus becomes a re-conception,
a powerful wilderness aesthetic that is not solely defined by masculine parameters:
Lucy "is here," and she "is entirely alive." Art - both literary and visual - is a conduit to
a transformation (or death) of individual subjectivity. With Lucy in the landscape -
behind every tree and stone the paintings become "holes that open inwards on the
wall, not like windows but like doors" (118). She becomes that conduit for transfor-
mation.

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 Debrah Raschke 79

NOTES

1/ Having died before the Group of Seven was formed, Tom Thomson was not an official member. He is
considered by most to be its inspiration.
2/ As Grace notes, there are a plethora of biographies on Thomson. I am using Blodwen Daviess biogra-
phy because it is considered a classic and because it is known, as Grace contends, for the beginning of a
romanticizing of Thomson that has made it nearly impossible to distinguish man from myth. I am using
William Little's biography because of his focus on the exhumation of Thomson's body, which becomes
important later in my argument.
3/ That she is the site of longing and ultimate transformation is nevertheless complex, given that Lucy is a
privileged girl from the United States. Shannon Hengen (Margaret Atwood's Power: Mirrors, Reflections and
Images in Select Fiction and Poetry. Toronto: Second Story P, 1993. Print) insightfully discusses the identity
issues that emerge from the power dynamics between the United States and Canada. Lucy's association
with the United States in this case, though, seems to be most connected with the South as loose and degen-
erate (and subsequently feminine). Lucy is the one with the boyfriend and is more sexually experienced
than Lois.

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DEBRAH RASCHKE is Professor of English at Southeast Missouri State U

teaches nineteenth-century literature, modern and contemporary literatu

mythology. Her publications include Modernism, Metaphysics , and Sexua

cles on modern and contemporary literature. She is also co-editor of Dori
Times.

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