Our Wives Under the Sea

The author introduces the novel with two epigraphs that emphasize the importance of juxtaposition in the book. The first is from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It reads, in part, “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.” Dated language notwithstanding, Melville juxtaposes land and sea to metaphorically describe the psychological struggles of the human soul. Humans are both rooted by comfort (land) and plagued by uncertainty (sea). The second set of quotations is from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, wherein Ellen and Martin Brody discuss where his fear of water originates: “Drowning,” he says. In turn, Leah’s love of water contrasts with the cost her wife pays for it, as shared through Miri’s experience of Leah’s return after the extended (and unintentionally long) mission at sea. The two epigraphs can also be contrasted themselves, from the high culture of canonical literature to the popular culture of summer blockbusters. Together, they help indicate that the novel will explore the spaces between land and sea, between light and darkness, and between horror and romance.

The Fathomless Ocean, an important motif throughout the novel, contains metaphorical multitudes. It is a place of horrors, as pointed out by Melville and the character Miri—the ocean is “haunted” by creatures one cannot see, much less know. It is both a place of natural wonder and supernatural dread. In addition, as readers move through the text, they are also transported geographically from the sunlight near the ocean’s surface to the inky darkness of the ocean deep. Thus, the ocean also encompasses both light and darkness.

The literal journeys that take place in the novel can also describe the map of Leah and Miri’s relationship, which can represent a relationship coming to its end more broadly. Part of the horror of romance is its often inherent ephemerality; the lightness of falling in love implies the existence of the darkness of growing apart. As Miri describes it here, “Meeting implies a point before knowing, a point before Leah and I became this fused, inextricable thing” (14). From separate entities to a bound couple, Miri traces their history in her narrative—which then must include their dissolution after Leah’s return. The novel itself includes both an interior examination and an exterior exploration. While Miri recounts the narrative of their relationship, Leah remembers the strangeness of her voyage. Psychologically speaking, these journeys hint at multiple kinds of expeditions: Miri thinks of Leah, “about her bright pale eyes and the shape of her mouth and the feeling when we spoke for the first time that there were vast places in the world that I had never yet thought to go” (24). Taken metaphorically, this impression hints at the vast realms of the heart. That is, before Leah, Miri had yet to explore the depths of her emotional capacity. In turn, Leah stares into her bathwater with “the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it” (14). In this case, taken metaphorically, Leah has reached some realization of a deeply buried personal truth that she cannot ignore. The groundwork for the theme of The Value of Relationships Ending is laid in these chapters, if largely in terms of what isn’t working in the relationship—and what has worked, what was once beneficial.

Miri likens the formation of her relationship with Leah to an art exhibition, with various pictures of significant moments described by helpful note cards:

You can wander the exhibition this way, picking favorites, placing dots by the frames of the pictures you most want to keep. Trickier is the task of pulling the pictures together, of connecting the points in a way that makes tangible sense (15).

The novel uses this art-gallery metaphor to explore Liminality as Integral to Change. The memorable flashpoints, while sometimes able to elicit joy for Miri, are not necessarily cohesive; the relationship does not fully make sense to her. The art gallery of memories exists somewhere between intelligibility and gibberish. As Miri believes, “What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent” (15). Leah, who travels far and ultimately glimpses a leviathan, has better potential to make sense of these parts. Miri, in contrast, struggles with anxiety and is attached to the land; catching her own glimpse of the whole of their relationship, and realizing what must be done about it, is likely to take her longer.

Miri’s dependence on Leah in these chapters, even as Leah’s transformation has begun, also establishes Transformation’s Role in Achieving Autonomy. Miri’s oppressive sense of isolation is only compounded by Leah’s silence. Miri does not even know her neighbors, whose television is always on, and she starts taking long walks away from the flat with no destination or task in mind. She keeps her friends at a distance and decides not to elaborate on Leah’s condition, partly because Leah’s transformation is marked not only by silence but also by disturbing physical changes. Leah suffers from near daily nosebleeds, and Miri once saw pinpoints of blood all over her skin: “Her blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized,” Miri thinks, “and so now just flows wherever it wants” (6). Miri later notes the silver sheen of Leah’s body, “oystered at her elbow creases and around the neck” (20). While Leah comments that all of this is merely the result of decompressing after so many months in the deep, Miri cannot help but feel unsettled by these unusual changes.