Re-Imagining Metropolis and Wilderness: Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man, Cat's Eye,Death by Landscape

This article explores Margaret Atwood's representations of landscape and gendered identities from a post-colonial/feminist perspective. It examines how, in the three texts discussed, Life Before Man , Cat's Eye andDeath By Landscape', the urban and the wilderness are employed as symbolic sites for inscribing Atwood's portrayals of feminine identity, and to problematise the process of defining the self in a post-colonial place. The article concludes that Margaret Atwood uses representations of place in ways which foreground the topics of post-colonialism, female relations, and feminine identities, and promote the possibility of writingother' stories by and about women. There was a moon, and a movement of the trees. In the sky there were stars, layers of stars that went down and down ... Out on the lake there were two loons, calling to each other in their insane, mournful voices. At the time it did not sound like grief. It was just background. (`Death By Landscape', Wilderness Tips 121) Margaret Atwood's writing presents a creative re-visioning of place as a symbolic site for negotiating shifting constructions of national and gendered identities. The imaginative use of place in her fictions illustrates the process of subverting and deconstructing images of centre, margin, and hierarchical constructions of value and power, which is an important feature of feminist and post-colonial writing. 68 By exploring representations of location and femininity in Atwood's fiction, this study interrogates the relationship between constructions of national and gendered identities and landscape in the specifically post-colonial contexts that she portrays. In Life Before Man and Cat's Eye , the two novels discussed here, Atwood works almost exclusively within an urban setting. This allows her to