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39 Chapter Two Specters of US Empire in Atwood's Fiction In her 2002 book on writing, Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood claims that "we are all living in the shadow cast by the Romantic movement, or in the fragments of that shadow" (xxvi). Negotiating with the Dead deals more extensively with the effect of the "Romantic cult of the writer as a great man" on post-Romantic writers than on Romantic poetry itself, but it points toward the importance of the Romantic "shadow" in Atwood's other works (51). A Romantic influence ominously marks Atwood 's short story "Death by Landscape" and her novel The Handmaid's Tale, both of which use intertexts with British Romantic poetry to stage the disappearance of their female protagonists. Like Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, "Death by Landscape" and The Handmaid's Tale are haunted by the absent Lucy of William Wordsworth's Lucy poems and equate this absence with erasure that occurs in a distinctly American —and decidedly imperial—context. Casting a shadow of her own on both the United States and the larger North American continent, Atwood invokes Romanticism in "Death by Landscape" and The Handmaid's Tale to depict empire's human costs, which come to light when her characters, Lucy and Offred, vanish in imperial landscapes. Linda Kauffman, writing about these human costs in the context of The Handmaid's Tale, notes that "the appropriation of the female body and voice is . . . closely allied with other political acts of appropriation and conquest" (226). Atwood's intertexts with Romanticism make the connection between "the appropriation of female body and voice" and larger-scale acts of imperial usurpation manifest. Lucy and others absent, but present in the landscape Like Kincaid's novel Lucy, Atwood's short story, "Death by Landscape" engages the problematic absence of Lucy in Wordsworth's Lucy poems by telling the story of another Lucy character that evokes the fate of Wordsworth's Lucy, which I discuss in chapter 1. In "Death by Landscape," Lucy's story, told via her childhood friend Lois, culminates in a dire and ambiguous ending that recalls that of Wordsworth's Lucy: While at summer camp, Atwood's Lucy seemingly vanishes into the land- 40 Chapter Two scape. Despite the title, it is not clear that Lucy dies when she disappears because her body is never found. More important than the question of whether or not Lucy is actually dead, however, is Lois's insistence that Lucy is alive and inside her personal space: "Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois's apartment, in the holes that open inward on the wall, not like windows, but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive" (57). Where Lucy seems to be—or at least where Lois imagines her—is within the Canadian landscape paintings showcased in Lois's apartment. Although placing Lucy within the paintings' landscapes is, admittedly, fantastical, by creating such an association Atwood draws the reader's attention to landscape itself. Landscape, Atwood suggests, does not resemble scenes one might view through "windows," but "doors" through which one travels to gain more direct access to the scene itself. The story of Lucy's disappearance in "Death by Landscape," in fact, opens its own door into a North American landscape haunted by those displaced and exterminated during European settlement. "Death by Landscape" begins by discussing Lois's recent move into a Toronto waterfront condominium. Living in the condominium is a huge relief to Lois, who is now a widow with grown children, because she does not have to worry about the natural world encroaching on her space, "about the lawn, or about 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" (49). Lois limits her contact with nature, but ironically, her most prized possessions are landscape paintings by famous Canadian artists. Although these paintings are worth a great deal of money, Lois values them not because they are investments, but because they mediate her engagement with a traumatic event from her childhood. When Lois was fourteen and at summer camp, she went on a canoe trip during which her best friend, Lucy, disappeared. Lucy's disappearance has become the defining moment of Lois's life: "She can hardly remember, now, having her two boys in the hospital, nursing them as babies; she can hardly...

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