Our Wives Under the Sea

The novel features multiple juxtapositions: it operates between the literary genres of romance and of horror (see Background: Literary Context); it moves between the land and the sea, the past and the present; it travels between the light and the darkness, moving ever deeper, with each part of the book named for the zones of the sea. The characters themselves are a study both in contrasts and in connections: Miri is anxious and uncertain, while Leah is steady and focused, and these opposing qualities complement each other. The story moves between recollections of a loving relationship and that relationship’s inevitable dissolution. It is not only Leah who is transforming. The relationship itself is undergoing an irreversible change. There is even tension between the natural and the supernatural. As a whole, the novel is a snapshot of liminality, or that period of transformation before something becomes something else. The novel thereby portrays Liminality as Integral to Change.

Miri’s struggles with anxiety reflect the general sense of dread that liminality often provokes. To be in a liminal time or space is to be vulnerable, caught between two points of stability. Any big life changes aggravate Miri’s anxiety. For example, Miri recalls how, on moving in with Leah, the new space unnerved her—in the dark new apartment, she felt that something could be lurking, perhaps about to drag one of them away. This anxiety extends to her relationship with Leah more broadly. The “sea lung” the couple witness on the water’s edge one morning is “a drifting anomaly of matter, solid and yet not quite so” (96). Its insubstantiality prompts Miri to question how solid she herself is, how tangible anything so delicate—like her love for Leah—could be. Accordingly, Miri lives on land. She prefers solidity and consistency.

In contrast, Leah’s profound interest in the sea marks the gravity and intensity of change. Liminality is meant to be temporary. Sure enough, as the novel starts, a transformation has already begun; its conclusion is inevitable, as much as Miri resists it. Miri has “always thought the edge of the water is somehow particularly cold,” while Leah understands it differently, scientifically: “It is something Leah has always put down to the shifting of the air between two elements, the chilly liminality of water and earth” (95). The two characters capture two distinct human reactions to change: dread versus curiosity, fear versus willing introspection. Regardless of reaction, though, change—once begun—is inevitable. The novel’s epigraph from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick helps further capture this distinction between the respective characters: He notes “the universal cannibalism of the sea” in contrast to “the green, gentle, and most docile earth.” In this sense, Leah’s interest in the sea also helps communicate the intensity of change. Leah’s transformation is a cannibalization of herself, with her body consuming what it once was to generate something new. This process is one way to view significant personal change—that is, the old “self” being consumed to give energy and form to the new “self.”

This theme also manifests in the context of time in the novel. Miri experiences Leah’s absence as a long period of counting days and restless waiting. Leah experiences her time beneath the sea as an interminable, incalculable existence in darkness. Jelka’s watch breaks upon their initial descent, and there is no other way to keep track of the passing days. As Leah notes, “In the sea, in the dark, there isn’t time” (99); for all the crew knows, their submersion could be eternity. The phrase “Time passed” (136) emerges several times in Leah’s narrative, its vagueness suggesting Leah’s resignation. The repetition of this phrase echoes Miri’s conclusion above the surface about taking the medical test that would determine whether she has the genetic marker for her mother’s unspecified disease:

There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless (156).

Applied to her relationship with Leah, the sentiment suggests why Miri has not sought medical assistance or confided in her friends about Leah’s worsening condition: Miri prefers to exist in stasis with Leah, suspended in this liminal moment.

The ocean zones that name each part of the book, in addition to marking progression, also suggest how liminality is a natural part of change. Leah explains early in her narrative how the ocean moves from the Sunlight Zone through the Twilight and Midnight Zones, where the surroundings grow ever darker, into the Abyssal Zone, “whose name roughly translates to ‘no bottom’” (72). There is then the Hadal Zone, “a name that speaks for itself” (72), Hadal being an adjective derived from the word “Hades.” Leah comes to understand, however, that these divisions are only descriptors. The lines between two states are rarely, if ever, absolute. Later, when Leah thinks about the surface, she is careful to clarify that even the division between sea and not sea is debatable: “There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either [...] where water yearns toward air and air yearns toward water,” what she terms “that middle place” (161). Sinking into ourselves, then surfacing again, transforms us. It is not always clear how, and not everyone emerges from such an experience alive. But the novel does argue that this process is rarely a simple before and after. The “middle place,” or that blurry period between one state and another, is where the real labor and turmoil lie.