Like much of Atwood’s writing, “Death by Landscape” explores issues related to womanhood and femininity in a way that can be considered feminist. The bulk of the story is told in flashback and spans Lucy’s and Lois’s preteen and early teen years. For girls, Atwood suggests, this adolescent period is a particularly fraught time because it marks the end of the relative freedom of childhood. As children at Camp Manitou, Lucy and Lois are still mostly exempt from gender roles; they participate in the same kinds of activities boys might (canoeing, hiking, etc.), take part in “rowdy sing-songs,” and pretend to be explorers (Part 2, Paragraph 12). However, given when the story is set (the mid-20th century), this kind of physicality and adventurousness are possible only in the years before the girls hit puberty; at that point, they encounter the gender roles they’ll be forced to conform to as adults, which demand that women be quiet and gentle and that their most important relationships be the romantic ones they form with men rather than the friendships they form among themselves.

There are hints early in the story that the happiness Lois and Lucy experience in their years at the camp is unsustainable.