Our Wives Under the Sea

Each short chapter ratchets up the suspension that culminates in Leah’s encounter with the deep-sea creature in her narrative and in Leah’s complete transformation and release in Miri’s. Miri’s symbolic Memories of Mother, including her mother’s final days, are interspersed with all of this, echoes of how terrifying it is to let go of a loved one. When Leah begins to breathe underwater, Miri thinks of her mother’s trip to hospice: “This was not an endpoint so much as it was a suspension” (192). The theme of Liminality as Integral to Change reaches a climax as the liminal period approaches its conclusion. The inevitability of the end is in clear sight, but the pending fate elicits a kind of horror. In her review of the novel in The Guardian, Aida Edemariam observes that the novel includes tropes of horror, which help sustain the novel’s momentum. However, Edemariam argues that the novel is concerned with “the unknown” far more than with horror tropes:

Armfield’s quarry feels larger: this is a kind of Orpheus story about transformation and return […] Armfield draws on collective fears: the ocean, always, but also deep space, other people, God, madness, the unconscious (our “sunken thoughts”), dementia. The unknown is embodied as a physicalised idea. […] Armfield is extremely good at anatomising the women’s relationship. (Edemariam, Aida. “Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield—Deep Emotions.” The Guardian, March 9, 2022.)

Edemariam’s description helps concretize the role of liminality in the novel. The liminal period is all that separates the characters from the unknown, and that elicits a kind of horror distinct from the thrills that Miri and Leach once enjoyed together during the movies they watched. Rather, this is the horror of grief, of life, of love lost—the dread of what will happen after a metaphorical death of human connections and a previous self.

The Fathomless Ocean, as a motif, plays a key role in framing Leah’s dissolution and, in turn, in the relationship’s dissolution. It becomes, throughout the novel, a character in and of itself, often personified and alternately revered (by Leah) and reviled (by Miri). As Leah understands, following the pirates of yore, the ocean is a treasure chest, filled with “more historical artifacts [...] than in all of the world’s museums” (187). It also, quite literally, inhabits its own life forms: “Almost everything that lives in the ocean is also made up of the ocean, to some degree, rather like the way we inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers” (188). It is not Mother Earth to which Leah turns—and returns—it is Mother Ocean. This understanding precipitates Leah’s transformation; it appears as if she is made more of sea, now, than earth: “[H]er skin seems to flex between states, first skin and then abalone and then water and back again” (198). Miri witnesses the last of “my Leah” (183, 221) as she recounts these changes. Leah breathes more comfortably under water than not, in the end, and all these years after Leah teaches Miri to swim, Miri must let her lover go back to the water. Ultimately, the ocean takes back what it has only briefly returned.

Leah, for her part, remains convinced that the ocean represents life, with her deepening conviction driving both her transformation and Transformation’s Role in Achieving Autonomy. Her conviction culminates in her refusal to allow the submarine to surface without seeing the deep: “I pressed my hands into the glass and knew the thing I’d always known: that we were in the ocean and that we couldn’t be alone” (209). While Jelka heard the voice, and her negative perception of it drove her to her own death, Leah desperately wants to see the unknown, and doing so will drive her toward transformation. Leah keeps her focus on her dreams, ones harbored since childhood: “We couldn’t—and I felt this with a force like a taste, like copper washed up against the backs of my teeth—we couldn’t go until I had seen it” (201). Once Leah has seen it, a new independence or capacity that has long resided in her seems to unlock; though she may hold on to her old self for Miri’s sake, her journey into a new self is now inevitable.

The novel’s emphasis on sight and eyes is often a mechanism for exploring The Value of Relationships Ending in terms of perspective. The perspective of others toward us is malleable and impermanent; we are rarely truly seen for who we are. In contrast, to perceive ourselves honestly, or to be perceived fully, is brutal and redefining. Nonetheless, humans wish to be truly seen. When Leah sees the creature’s eye, she is overwhelmed by exhaustion, certain that “there would never be any way of knowing whether we had come here intentionally, whether we had been pulled down or pushed” (211). She then writes her name on a piece of paper and holds it up to the window. Thereafter, as her transformation proceeds, this experience haunts her. When she and Miri undergo therapy, the images Leah sees in the Rorschach test are “an eye, and an eye and an eye and an eye and an eye” (91). As Leah strives to stay with Miri, she loses her own eye in a flood of seawater (171). In comparison, Miri’s friend, Carmen, struggles with her eyesight, eventually undergoing a surgery to recover it. Miri’s fear, in response to this news, is whether Carmen will recognize her: “But will you recognize me, I want to ask her, want to know how it is I will look in her new unencumbered vision, whether I will show up at all” (192). Relationships are complex dances of perception and fragile connection. As the time for one to end approaches, it becomes increasingly unclear how the participants will view one another after and how they will be viewed by others. As one of the messages on the missing-persons website suggests, “you’re really the one who has to kill them. Or not them but the idea of them—you have to make a choice to let it end” (185).

Part 5 is entitled “Hadal Zone,” a reference to the deepest part of the ocean. Jelka does not return from this zone. In an effort to use the escape hatch, she is crushed by the water. Matteo, for his part, muses about where their submarine has landed: “Did you ever think that maybe this is just a dead part [...]. I mean, not that we’re not in the ocean but that we’ve somehow fallen down into some part of it that died however many years ago and now there’s nothing here at all” (176). Leah cannot accept either of these alternatives; she must know what lives in the deep—even at the expense of the rest of her (terrestrial) life. Miri herself must eventually accept these choices, this outcome. As Juna observes about how the living must go on without their lost loved ones, “living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know” (217). This is, indeed, what Miri must do, an act that is as heroic as it is tragic.