So Much Water So Close to Home

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What do the norms, laws, and prevailing attitudes of your society say about violence against women? Have these ideas changed over time?

Teaching Suggestion: This question orients students to the central conflict in the story: Claire’s fear that she will be a victim of gender-based violence or even femicide—a gender-based murder of a woman or girl, in particular by a man. Claire’s concern for her safety, as well as her concern for other women who are victims of gender-based violence, indicates that she is hyperaware of Gender Norms’ Harmful Effects On Women, which ultimately increases The Pervasiveness Of Doubt And Deception that she has toward her husband’s innocence. This story is a reminder that for women, any given man may be a latent violent threat. Carver’s story is decades old, but the reality of violence against women remains: One quarter of American women today have endured severe physical violence by a partner.

• United Nations Women shares “Five Essential Facts to Know About Femicide.”
• Chicago Policy Review discusses the effect of patriarchal social constructs on femicide in “Is the US Still Too Patriarchal to Talk About Women? The Silent Epidemic of Femicide in America.”

Short Activity

Author Raymond Carver was a significant contributor to the literary subgenre of Dirty Realism. Working in small groups, research and select a work of this subgenre to share with your classmates. What are some of the elements of Dirty Realism? How does it connect to and differ from realism?

Teaching Suggestion: This Short Activity orients students with the genre of Carver’s writing: “Dirty Realism.” Based on the level of the class, this Short Activity may be introduced with a discussion of the Realism genre, allowing students to find the correlation and differences from the Dirty Realism subgenre. The links below may be used as a starting point for students’ research.

• The Stanford Daily explores “Dirty Realism: Authenticity in the 20th Century” in this opinion piece.
• This 2008 article from The Guardian examines Carver’s status as “the American Chekhov.”

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the story.

Consider the meaning of the term “doubt.” How might doubt about a loved one’s honesty shape a person’s actions and fears?

Teaching Suggestion: This Personal Connection Prompt invites students to explore the theme of The Pervasiveness Of Doubt And Deception from their own perspective. In the story, Claire is suspicious that her husband Stuart shares some responsibility for the death of a girl. Although Stuart insists that he is innocent, Claire is immediately suspicious of her husband’s possible involvement, recalling the death of a girl during her childhood and that the perpetrators were never caught. In this way, she is doubtful because she is a woman and identifies with other women who trusted men who then abused that trust in unspeakable ways. Doubt, therefore, has a gendered aspect to it that the story explores. This Prompt segues directly to the Discussion/Analysis Prompt.