Our Wives Under the Sea

“Did you know that until very recently, more people had been to the moon than had dived beyond the depths of six thousand meters? I think about this often—the inhospitableness of certain places.”

Here, Leah implicitly acknowledges her fascination with the ocean, not to mention her determination to dive deep into such inhospitable places. These lines reveal her adventurous personality. This quote is also notable because Leah’s appeal to an unspecified audience reveals that she records her experiences for the express purpose of having someone read about them.

“We have always lived here—met in a pale electric summer, moved quickly from our respective basement studios to the second-floor flat we have shared for seven years. Before she transferred to the Centre, Leah used to take the train each morning, an hour at least to run her out through brown uncertain marshlands to the research facility, minutes from the sea. An hour back again at night, her clothes salt-glazed, her skin scoured smooth by coastal weather. Strange, to live in such proximity to an ocean that I almost never see.”

While Leah is forever leaning toward the ocean, Miri is firmly bound to the land. This contrast reveals one of the fundamental oppositions between their personalities. While Miri works from home, nesting in their apartment, Leah prefers to work outside, in the natural elements. As the novel progresses, this contrast intensifies, Leah ultimately transforming into something reflecting her internal nature.

“My friends often told me in those early days that we were similar, something I always thought bizarre, although Leah pointed out that all they meant by this was that we both talked fast and watched movies in the evenings after work. In truth, I never thought there were too many points of congruence between us.”

Miri herself acknowledges the differences between the two. Miri speculates that this sort of comment reveals a subconscious bias, that the comparison “had more to do with the two of us being women than it did with anything real” (29). She appreciates the differences between herself and her wife; their personalities often complement each other.

“The deep sea is dark, particularly when the lights on your submersible craft have cut out for some reasons unknown. I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of the strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all of their teeth.”

The invisible teeth indicate an environment in which something is liable to attack, to bite. It echoes the horror movies that Leah and Miri like to watch, where the bite of a werewolf or a vampire can irrevocably alter their victims. The comparison also personifies the imagined sea creatures with their “smiling” (threatening) faces.

“I had intended to stay in the spare room only one night and yet somehow never moved back. This is something I am, for the moment, not willing to examine too closely.”

Miri is strangely passive in the face of Leah’s dissolution and the unraveling of their relationship. Her reactions often mark an exploration of the theme of Liminality as Integral to Change. Here, while she is clearly aware that Leah is different, that their marriage is troubled, she is unwilling to acknowledge these realities. Instead, she hovers in the liminal space of the spare room, ruminating on their past together, remembering all of the incidents that brought them happiness and love.

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”

Miri is eager for her unspecified audience to know Leah as she does, to love her as she does. She is aware of the impossibility of such a task, but it attests to her continuing attachment to Leah—particularly the Leah that she identifies as “my Leah.” This new Leah, who has changed and continues to transform, is inscrutable (and therefore frightening) to Miri.

“I don’t know what my endless reading and rereading of the book was what specifically instilled in me the desire to explore the ocean. More likely, I simply read it so much that it fell apart and I had to go and find something to do, like exploring the ocean.”

Leah talks about her father’s unnamed book about the Challenger Deep, thought to be the deepest part of the ocean found in the Mariana Trench. She reads the book repeatedly as a young girl, imprinting the depths onto her psyche. The Fathomless Ocean, as a motif, develops a great deal through Leah’s drive to explore it. As an endless, boundless space, it represents many manifestations of the unknown throughout the novel, yet Leah, at her core, is always drawn toward it.

“The printed label at the bottom left-hand corner of the card read: PAMELA—GIANT PACIFIC OCTOPUS—ESTIMATED AGE BETWEEN 3 AND 4 YEARS OLD. I had given the cards to Leah and she had cried about them and kissed me, and I’m really only telling this story now because it makes me look good, and because Leah always took the postcard of Pamela with her on work trips after that.”

The image of the octopus, and Leah’s relationship to Pamela, becomes a motif in the novel. The unknown creature that Leah finally encounters in the deep seems to be akin to a giant octopus, and Leah studies her postcard of Pamela in order to soothe herself while she is trapped beneath the ocean. This comment also reveals Miri’s self-centered nature; she tells the story to show herself in a positive light. It implies that Miri may not always be a reliable narrator.

“I’m not sure what happens after this, only that the screaming proves to have been almost entirely unconscious, as when I shake her awake it stops and she stares at me, mouth swollen with salt, and she doesn’t seem to know me at all.”

Miri is awakened by the sound of Leah shrieking in the other room. When Miri enters, Leah is leaking water from her pores and vomiting copious amounts of seawater in her bed. Leah’s physical and psychological transformation is turning her back (in)to the sea. Just as she begins to forget Miri’s name as she is buried under miles of water, she forgets Miri as she transforms. These moments play into the theme of Transformation’s Role in Achieving Autonomy.

“It would, I suppose, have been entirely possible to hit the seabed without falling into one of the trenches, although looking out through the blackness, I believed almost without question that we had fallen as far as it was possible to go. It was difficult to imagine anywhere deeper than the place we had ended up.”

Leah’s fascination with the Challenger Deep has now brought her to what she believes is the deepest part of the ocean. It is also a psychological reflection: there is no place farther down than where Leah’s “sunken thoughts” can take her. She is plumbing the depths of her subconscious alongside the depths of the ocean.

“I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved.”

Miri thinks the unthinkable, the unavoidable. Miri has become adept at keeping people, including even her mother, at arm’s length. Leah is the only person who is able to soothe Miri’s anxieties, to redirect her frightened thoughts. As in many stories about the hero’s journey, the hero must lose her mentor in order to become a true hero.

“I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.

I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed when they hadn’t.”

Again, Miri’s view of the world is one in which she is central. Her selfishness is fueled by anxiety and by her upbringing (her mother is emotionally unavailable); it is a survival mechanism. Leah is the first person to pull Miri out of her armor, and Miri cannot bear to move forward without her—until it becomes imperative for saving her. The Value of Relationships Ending emerges with such reflections; Miri’s capacity to acknowledge this inner truth is part of her initiating her own transformation through truly seeing herself.

“When we decided to get married, I took the same tape measure to gauge Leah’s ring size and having done so, decided to measure all of her, wrapping the metal strip around her waist and her upper thighs and the place where one bicep was bigger than the other, measuring the line of her clavicles and the distance between each fingertip and the floor.”

This moment embodies the cliché “taking the measure” of someone, wherein Miri must obsessively know every inch of Leah. It represents the kind of possessiveness—and objectification—under which Leah lives with Miri. While it is couched in affection, it indicates the depth of anxiety Leah’s transformation evokes in Miri, as Leah’s transformation is part of both women discovering their own autonomy.

“When the noise returned, this time on the opposite side of the craft and louring inward (leering inward? swooning inward? It’s hard, in retrospect, to assign a tone), I closed my eyes and thought about the shifting shell-soft texture of an octopus mantle, and after a while I felt better.”

Leah comforts herself with the thought that the ancient creature knocking outside the door of the submarine is a kind of octopus. She thinks of Pamela, the octopus for which she cared at the aquarium so long ago, as a highly intelligent, curious, and affectionate creature. This perception explains why Leah is more interested in than frightened by the creature when she eventually sees it. She even introduces herself, communicating that they share a connection.

“The world was different once, dry, before a century of rain that filled the oceans. Sometimes I think about this, the way that things might once have walked about the deepest places without fear of drowning. Sometimes I think of oceans rising faster than it is possible to escape them, of water drawing tight around the boundaries of land.”

The space between land and sea is not so distinct as it would first appear. Here, the sea encroaches upon the land, leaving little safe space outside of the fierce and unknown ocean. This is a rare sentiment from Leah, who usually looks to discover what can be known about the vast ocean. Underneath the pressure of all that water, Leah expresses an implied fear of drowning.

“Leah lies on the grass where she has fallen, curved into herself like a conch, like something from which a creature might emerge.”

Miri attempts to get Leah out of the flat, taking her on a walk. But Leah can no longer navigate the land; she is clumsy and awkward, falling to the ground. The simile compares her to a sea creature, the conch, foreshadowing Leah’s ultimate transformation.

“I think, in a peculiar way, of how similar this is to before, despite everything—the way that Leah was so often fine when I wasn’t, the way that I seemed so endlessly clenched and tense and prone to discomfort where Leah was simply happy to sit as she was.”

Leah accepts, even embraces, her transformation. She tells Miri repeatedly that everything is fine, even when it is clear that what is happening to her is unprecedented. Leah waits in the bath, awaiting what comes next with quiet curiosity—or, at least, without complaint. Miri is the one who is scared and frustrated; she does not relinquish control easily.

“This isn’t the ocean, I thought to myself, once and very clearly, I just wanted to see the ocean, and then for a long time after that I thought nothing because I realized it would just be easier.”

Leah begins to lose hope in the submarine, after months of being trapped in the dark. This world is certainly not the ocean Leah hoped to explore; it seems to harbor no life, no possibility for exploration. The mass of all that water weighs heavily on her, quashing her dreams of discovery.

“Her sister was dead, she told me, and the Centre had at first given her contradictory information, then seemed to start screening her calls, then appeared to close up shop altogether. She had been forced to find things out for herself, she told me, had things she needed to show me.”

Juna reveals to Miri that her sister Jelka has died as a result of the expedition—though she cannot explain exactly what happened to her. Juna exposes what Miri already suspects about the Centre: Its motives are mysterious, its oversight nonexistent, and its foundation likely corrupt. Its disappearance speaks to potentially criminal, or at least unethical, behavior. As a symbol, the mysterious Centre hints at the inexplicable attraction Leah feels, at her very core, to explore dangerous places.

“As a hypochondriac, the typical response when I’m panicking is to acknowledge it will end. At some point, I will cease to be convinced that I have a brain tumor, or a stomach ulcer, or some degenerative condition of the nerves, and so at some point, the bad thing will end. When something bad is happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.”

Miri acknowledges here that her tendency toward hypochondria has informed her reactions to Leah’s transformation. That is, it was possible, for a long time, to ignore the most dramatic changes that she witnesses. Leah reassures Miri that all will be fine, and Miri has been conditioned to believe it. However, once Miri realizes that these changes are permanent, the horror sets in. There is no more plausible deniability.

“She has been lying in [the bathwater] for so long that there is a scum of dust over the surface and the salt is collecting across the upper planes of her body. I try to pull her from the water, although when I do so, her face is not as I remember it.”

Just as Leah begins to forget Miri, in the submarine and during the most dramatic moments of her transformation, so too does Miri begin to lose the Leah that she once recognized. That is, the changes—to both of them, one could argue—lead them further away from the person they once knew and loved. The dissolution of memory and of recognition undergirds the dissolution of the relationship.

“I looked into that eye, now filling the entire view of the windows, and I felt, with an exhaustion that sat down inside me as though unable to support its own weight, that there would never be any way of knowing whether we had come here intentionally, whether we had been pulled down or pushed.”

Leah, mesmerized by the eye of the great sea creature, acknowledges that it is ultimately impossible to know whether she and the others were sent here deliberately by the Centre or whether they accidentally fell into the depths. The crew could be the unwitting victims of a risky experiment or, conversely, the unlucky victims of an unplanned accident. While she is elated to encounter the ancient creature, she is wearied—and irrevocably altered—by the experience.

“I had not intended to take Leah down to the water, but when I wake beside the bath, having apparently fallen asleep with my cheek against the lip of the tub, I catch the direction of her remaining eye beneath the surface, the way it turns toward the window, and I think, Well, yes.”

Miri’s last actions are to sacrifice her own love for Leah in order to save Leah herself. She sees Leah’s longing for the sea—surely knowing that it is now the only place left for her to thrive—and she relinquishes her possession of Leah. She acquiesces to Leah’s final wishes.