Our Wives Under the Sea: 12 Analytical Essay Prompts

These twelve prompts are designed to move beyond summary and toward argument. Each one targets a specific mechanism of Julia Armfield's novel—its dual narration, its use of the body as a site of transformation, its deliberate withholding of explanation—so that an essay responding to any of them must engage closely with the text's particular choices. For each prompt, you'll find a rationale, a defensible thesis direction (not a full thesis, but a claim you could argue), and concrete evidence leads drawn from specific chapters. Use the leads as starting points, not exhaustive lists; the best essays will trace connections across chapters that these prompts only gesture toward.

1. Leah's Transformation: From Explorer to Creature of the Deep

Why it matters: Leah's physical and psychological metamorphosis is the novel's central engine. Tracing her change from the confident marine scientist who coolly explains submarine mechanics in Chapter 3 to the woman whose skin shifts between "skin and abalone and water" in Chapter 36 reveals how the novel uses the body as a site of narrative meaning. This prompt asks you to track a character change that is neither simple decline nor simple growth, but something stranger.

Sample thesis direction: Leah's transformation is not a punishment or a miracle but the logical endpoint of a life spent seeking the ocean's depths; the novel suggests that immersion in the unknown inevitably remakes the seeker, and that the body is the medium through which this remaking occurs.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 3: Leah's description of sinking as "a curious act of surrender" and her recollection of Miri's phrase "sunken thoughts"
Chapter 22: Leah shows Miri her skin shifting "from white to blue to green" with a "drifting, unmoored texture"
Chapter 36: Miri describes Leah's skin flexing "between states, first skin and then abalone and then water and back again"
Chapter 40: Leah's body dissolves into the sea when Miri releases her at the beach

2. The Centre's Role: Accident, Experiment, or Cover-Up?

Why it matters: The novel withholds the truth about the mission's purpose, and the Centre's behavior—the comms cutting out, the quarantine, the disappearing website—raises urgent questions about institutional responsibility and the ethics of exploration. This prompt asks you to weigh the evidence for deliberate sabotage against the possibility of genuine catastrophe.

Sample thesis direction: The Centre's deliberate opacity transforms the novel from a survival story into a critique of institutions that treat human beings as expendable research material; the mission's true purpose is never revealed because the novel's argument is precisely that such purposes are hidden from those who serve them.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 3: Leah realizes the comms "hadn't faded like a wavering signal so much as been switched off"
Chapter 26: The Centre's website returns a 404 error; the phone rings unanswered; Miri has misplaced the address
Chapter 29: Matteo tells Leah "they switched us off externally" and suspects they were "dropped in a tank at feeding time"
Chapter 40: Juna describes the Centre's contradictory information, the "sports coat" man, and the dead phone number he gave her

3. Miri and Leah: The Failure of Language

Why it matters: The novel's dual narration shows two people who love each other but cannot bridge the gap between Leah's underwater experience and Miri's surface-world comprehension. This is the book's most human tragedy, and it plays out in small domestic moments as much as in the submarine's dark.

Sample thesis direction: The novel argues that trauma cannot be communicated through language alone; Miri and Leah's relationship fails not from lack of love but from the impossibility of translating experience, and the novel's form—two narrators who never quite reach each other—enacts this failure.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 2: Miri on hold with the Centre, unable to obtain Leah's personnel number, the call terminated
Chapter 6: The phone representative refuses to speak to anyone but Leah; Miri reads Leah a newspaper article about squid paralarvae
Chapter 10: Miri withholds details from Carmen, reflecting on her "reluctance to confide"
Chapter 35: Leah tries to imagine explaining to Miri but "the imaginary me opened her mouth and produced only a strange, whaling ocean sound"

4. Contrasting Scenes: The Wedding and the Bath

Why it matters: The novel juxtaposes the couple's joyful past—the town-hall wedding, early dates, shared films—against the claustrophobic present of baths, bandages, and saltwater. These contrasts define the arc of loss and give the novel its emotional texture.

Sample thesis direction: By interleaving flashbacks of courtship and marriage with scenes of Leah's aquatic deterioration, the novel measures grief not in dramatic events but in the erosion of shared rituals—the same gestures of care that once expressed love now express only the management of decline.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 24: The wedding at the town hall, walking out into rain, sharing burgers; the flashback of moving into the flat with Toby and Sam
Chapter 20: Miri measuring Leah with a tape measure, as she did before their wedding, though she lost the original measurements
Chapter 26: Miri moving the television into the bathroom to play Jaws, sitting beside the tub as Leah flicks water at her
Chapter 36: Miri wrapping Leah in saltwater-soaked towels, a grotesque inversion of the intimacy they once shared

5. Ambiguous Grief: Mourning Without a Body

Why it matters: Miri's six-month wait for Leah, her assumption of death, and her eventual release of Leah into the sea all engage with the concept of ambiguous grief—loss without closure, mourning for someone who is both absent and present. This prompt connects the novel's emotional core to its thematic concerns.

Sample thesis direction: The novel uses Leah's transformation to explore how grief operates when the lost person is still present but no longer recognizable; Miri's mourning begins long before Leah's physical dissolution, and the novel suggests that this anticipatory grief is its own form of loss.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 14: Miri's five months of waiting, the online forum for "wives of fictional spacemen," assuming Leah dead, calling Sam crying
Chapter 18: Miri reading posts about "grief and ambiguity" on a website for missing loved ones, considering messaging a woman but not doing so
Chapter 40: Juna's line about "the absence of afterward" and "letting go of them in the water"
Chapter 40: Miri releasing Leah's dissolving body into the sea, the novel's final act of letting go

6. Water as Symbol: The Bath as Liminal Space

Why it matters: Water is the novel's master symbol—the bath, the sea, the salt, the water leaking from Leah's body. The bath functions as a threshold between human and aquatic existence, a domestic space where the ocean's claim on Leah becomes visible.

Sample thesis direction: The bath is not a refuge but a staging ground for transformation; the novel uses domestic water to show that the ocean's claim on Leah cannot be confined to the deep, and that the home itself becomes a site of submersion.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 22: Miri easing Leah into the filled tub where "she seems calmer"
Chapter 26: Leah bathing "approximately sixty percent of the day," Miri bringing salt dissolved in beakers of water
Chapter 28: Leah leaking water "from eyes, ears, and mouth," her legs failing as Miri tries to pull her out
Chapter 36: Miri's realization that she "cannot keep her here" (in the bath), leading to the call to Juna

7. Structure: The Dual Narration's Uneven Knowledge

Why it matters: The alternating chapters—Miri's surface world and Leah's descent—create a structural tension. Miri knows Leah's symptoms but not their cause; Leah knows the cause but cannot articulate it. The reader holds both perspectives, and this structural choice is itself an argument about knowledge and isolation.

Sample thesis direction: The novel's alternating structure enacts its central theme: knowledge without understanding, and the isolation of experience. The reader's position—seeing both sides while neither narrator can—mirrors the novel's claim that the deepest truths resist communication.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 2 (Miri) vs. Chapter 3 (Leah): Miri's domestic observations of bleeding and aversion vs. Leah's technical explanation of descent and the smell of meat
Chapter 7 (Leah): The descent, the dead signal, the wish for a deck of cards, the imagined game of old maid
Chapter 26 (Miri): The Centre's disappearance, Leah's collapse on the common, the woman with the dachshund
Chapter 40 (Miri) vs. Chapter 41 (Leah): The release into the sea and the surfacing, two accounts of the same ending

8. Foreshadowing: The Smell of Meat and the Epigraphs

Why it matters: The novel plants early clues—the Moby-Dick epigraph about the sea's treachery, the Jaws exchange about drowning, the recurring smell of burning flesh—that pay off in the final confrontation with the creature. This prompt asks you to trace how the novel prepares its ending.

Sample thesis direction: The novel's foreshadowing is not decorative but structural; the epigraphs and sensory premonitions prepare the reader for a transformation that is both physical and metaphysical, and the smell of meat functions as a recurring signal of the creature's approach.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 1: The Moby-Dick passage about "universal cannibalism" and the warning "Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return"; the Jaws exchange identifying "drowning"
Chapter 3: Jelka and Leah both smell "meat" twenty minutes before losing contact
Chapter 19: Jelka wakes asking whether Leah smells "something burning—meat straight off the bone"
Chapter 39: The burning smell grows closer as the creature rises from the chasm

9. The Ending: Release, Dissolution, and the Creature's Eye

Why it matters: The novel's ending—Miri releasing Leah into the sea, and Leah's account of surfacing after staring into the creature's eye—resists easy interpretation. Is it a death, a homecoming, or a transformation? This prompt asks you to commit to a reading of the novel's final gesture.

Sample thesis direction: The ending refuses to distinguish between death and metamorphosis; the novel's final gesture is to dissolve the boundary between human and ocean, and Leah's offering of her name to the creature suggests that recognition—not survival—is the deepest form of contact.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 39: Leah writing her name in the leather logbook and pressing it against the window for the creature to see
Chapter 40: Miri carrying Leah down the smuggler's path and releasing her; her body dissolves into the water
Chapter 41: Leah and Matteo surfacing, the creature's "strange, anticipatory expression" as they move away
Chapter 41: Leah thinking of Miri and "waiting for the ocean to end"

10. The Limits of Knowledge: Science vs. the Unknowable

Why it matters: Leah is a scientist who catalogs ocean facts, yet the novel repeatedly shows that knowledge cannot protect her—from the creature, from the transformation, from the failure of technology. This prompt engages the novel's skepticism about scientific mastery.

Sample thesis direction: The novel critiques the scientific impulse to master the unknown; Leah's accumulation of facts is a defense mechanism that ultimately fails against the ocean's fundamental mystery, and the novel suggests that the deepest truths are not navigable but only encountered.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 3: Leah's technical explanation of submarine descent, immediately followed by the system failure
Chapter 13: Leah's catalog of the five ocean depth zones, unable to determine her own depth without the system
Chapter 33: Leah's list of ocean facts—tidal mechanics, the seven seas, Niagara Falls—conceding that "accumulating knowledge cannot shield her from uncertainty"
Chapter 42: The author's note admitting "I am not a marine biologist" and relying on Carson, Montgomery, and other sources

11. Jelka's Faith and Matteo's Skepticism

Why it matters: The crew's divergent responses to the crisis—Jelka's prayer and saints, Matteo's paranoia and torches, Leah's detachment—model different ways of confronting the unknown. This prompt asks you to compare these responses and their outcomes.

Sample thesis direction: The novel uses Jelka and Matteo as opposing responses to existential threat—faith and suspicion—and shows both failing, leaving Leah's quiet endurance as the only viable stance; the novel neither endorses nor dismisses belief, but shows it as one more inadequate tool.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 17: Jelka's explanation of praying with saints, not to them; Saint Brendan's Atlantic voyage in search of the Garden of Eden
Chapter 29: Matteo's circle of torches, his paranormal-detective story, his suspicion that the Centre lied
Chapter 31: Jelka's breakdown, Matteo's apology and offer to pray, both saying "It'll be all right now"
Chapter 35: Matteo inviting Leah into his circle of torches in silent companionship, the two sitting together without words

12. The Octopus: From Pamela to the Creature

Why it matters: The octopus recurs throughout the novel—Leah's teenage job at the aquarium, the postcard of Pamela, the creature in the deep. It symbolizes the intelligence and otherness of the ocean, and it connects Leah's past to her fate.

Sample thesis direction: The octopus functions as the novel's emblem of nonhuman consciousness; Leah's relationship with Pamela prefigures her encounter with the creature, suggesting that the ocean's inhabitants have always been watching and that Leah's affinity for them is both her gift and her doom.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 12: Leah's teenage job at an aquarium, including the giant Pacific octopus named Pamela; her thirtieth-birthday gift of aquarium postcards
Chapter 29: Leah's dream of the octopus and a changed Miri; the postcard of Pamela found aboard the craft
Chapter 39: The creature rising from the chasm, "its eye and face filling the windows" and seeming to fill the ocean
Chapter 39: Leah thinking of "an octopus she once cared for" and tide-pool creatures from childhood as she faces the creature

For further study, see the chapter-by-chapter questions and answers, the thematic overviews, and the character pages for additional context on the novel's major concerns.