How Submersion Erases Memory and Identity in Our Wives Under the Sea
The Thematic Claim: Submersion as Erasure
In Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield constructs a world where submersion—both the literal submersion of a deep-sea dive and the metaphorical submersion of grief and waiting—systematically erodes memory and identity. The novel's central claim is that the self is not a fixed entity but a fragile construction requiring the stability of time, light, and human connection to persist. When those supports are removed, the boundaries between past and present, reality and hallucination, self and other begin to dissolve.
The epigraphs establish this claim from the outset. The Melville passage warns that the sea's beauty conceals danger and that leaving the peaceful island of the soul means an impossible return. The Jaws exchange names the condition: death by submersion in water. Together, they frame the novel's central question: what does it mean to be submerged, and what survives?
Part One: The Descent—Time and Self in the Sunken Craft
Leah's chapters trace the crew's gradual cognitive and emotional breakdown on the seafloor. The novel is precise about the mechanics. In chapter 17, Leah explains that without power, the submarine's light system—which normally cycles through stages of brightness to maintain circadian rhythms—fails, and a few days can be all it takes for those rhythms to break down. The loss of time is the first casualty of submersion.
The crew's deteriorations follow distinct patterns. Matteo grows increasingly irritable, interrupting his own sentences to ask if others can hear noises, and Leah wakes to find him standing at the foot of her bunk, apologizing and claiming he must have drifted off. Jelka, on what she believes is her birthday, asks Leah whether she can hear the talking, the words—sounds that do not exist. Leah herself, pressing her face against the main-deck window, realizes she doesn't know how she came to be where she is: I had, it appeared, been sleeping, and now I was here. When Matteo asks if she experienced the same disorientation, she replies, I wasn't here, hearing the illogic of her own words even as she speaks them.
The most devastating erosion is the loss of the name that anchors Leah's identity. When Matteo mentions the plan and the research project, Leah struggles to recall the Centre and the purpose of their mission. She reaches for the memory of Miri's phrase sunken thoughts and finds that it takes her longer than it should to dredge the name from the bottom of my mind. The name—Miri's name, the name of the person who defines Leah's life above water—has sunk to the bottom of her consciousness.
This is not merely forgetfulness. The novel suggests that the deep sea actively erases traces, as Leah notes in chapter 3: the ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks. Unlike the moon, which preserves footprints indefinitely, the ocean erases all marks. The crew's identities are being erased in the same way—not destroyed suddenly, but gradually covered over.
Part Two: The Return—Leah's Transformation and Miri's Witness
When Leah returns to the surface, the erosion continues, now visible to Miri. The physical changes are grotesque: bleeding from gums and pores, waterlogged skin, a voice that seems to drown in air, unused to oxygen. But the psychological changes are more profound. In chapter 12, Miri describes waking to Leah's screams, finding her convulsing and vomiting water across the bed. When Miri shakes her awake, Leah doesn't seem to know me at all.
Miri's own identity is eroded by witnessing Leah's dissolution. She describes their relationship as a fused, inextricable thing, and her memory of their shared past as like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. The couple's game of remembering—the shared mythology of their relationship—becomes impossible when one participant can no longer play. Miri's grief is complicated by ambiguity: Leah is present but not present, returned but not returned.
The bath becomes the central symbol of this liminal state. Leah fills the bathtub at odd hours, staring into the water with the fixed expression of someone barely awake. The bath is a threshold between land and sea, a place where Leah can partially return to the element that has claimed her. When Miri eases Leah into the water, she seems less troubled—the water that is destroying her is also the only place she finds relief. This contradiction is central to the novel's treatment of erosion: the thing that erases the self is also the thing that soothes it. The salt that lingers in Leah's mouth after her convulsions is the residue of this process, the trace of the sea that refuses to be washed away.
Part Three: The Dissolution—Leah's Final Erasure
The final chapters complete the process. In chapter 40, Miri brings Leah to her mother's house by the sea—a reunion made possible only by Leah's dissolution—places her in a saltwater bath, and later carries her down the smuggler's path to the beach. She wades into the sea and releases Leah, whose body dissolves into the water. The woman who returned from the deep is returned to the deep, her physical form erased as completely as her memories were. Juna gives Miri a coat containing pages Leah wrote—a written record that survives the erosion of Leah's physical form, suggesting that memory can be preserved in external forms even as the self dissolves.
Leah's account of the ascent, in chapter 41, complicates this ending. She and Matteo surface after staring into the creature's eye, clasping hands and appealing to a being neither of them believed in. The creature does not prevent their ascent, but its eye holds a strange, anticipatory expression. As they rise, Leah's head clears and the sunken thoughts receded with what they had left below. The implication is that the thoughts—the memories, the identity—were left behind in the deep, and what surfaces is only the shell.
Character and Symbol Connections
The erosion is distributed across the novel's characters. Leah is the primary victim, but not the only one. Jelka's death—her body expelled from the craft while submerged—is the most literal form of erasure: a person reduced to a regulatory procedure, a letter of notification. Matteo's survival is marked by the same disorientation, suggesting the erosion is the universal condition of those who descend. Miri's identity is eroded by grief and uncertainty, her memory of Leah becoming a series of pictures she can no longer connect into a coherent whole. Juna, who receives her sister's effects after an altercation at the Centre, embodies the institutional dimension of erasure: the dead are processed, catalogued, and returned as objects.
The symbols reinforce the theme. The Saint Brendan figurine, which Jelka tells Leah about in chapter 17, represents the journey as both quest and punishment—his own quest for the holy land or a punishment. The figurine's face turned to the wall during Jelka's birthday scene suggests the withdrawal of spiritual protection. The eye—both the creature's eye and the carved insignia on the console—represents the gaze that witnesses but does not intervene.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel resists a simple reading of erosion as purely destructive. The ocean that erases Leah's identity is also the ocean she loves, the element she has devoted her life to studying. Her father taught her to swim as aversion therapy, and she grew used to the water in stages before falling in love with it. The erosion is not an external invasion but a process Leah has willingly entered, a surrender the novel describes as a curious act of surrender.
There is also a contradiction between the novel's treatment of memory loss as tragedy and its suggestion that memory itself is unreliable. Miri's memory of their relationship is borne out by evidence, but she acknowledges that stepping back too far makes me dizzy. The novel questions whether the self that is eroded is ever fully coherent to begin with. Leah's sunken thoughts predate the dive; the erosion of the deep sea accelerates a process already underway.
Finally, the novel leaves unresolved whether Leah's transformation is physical, psychological, or supernatural. The Centre's evasions, the contradictory information, the disconnected phone numbers—all suggest a cover-up, but the novel never confirms what happened in the deep. The erosion of certainty is itself a form of erosion, and the reader is left in the same state of confusion as Miri.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the novel use the contrast between the moon and the ocean to develop the theme of erosion?
Leah observes that the moon preserves footprints while the ocean covers its tracks. This contrast establishes the central metaphor: the ocean is an agent of erasure, while the moon preserves. The deep sea, like the human mind under pressure, does not retain what it receives. The novel applies this metaphor to memory and identity, suggesting that the self, like a footprint on the seafloor, is eventually covered over.
2. What role does the bath play in Leah's post-return condition?
The bath is a liminal space between land and sea. Leah fills the bathtub at odd hours and stares into the water, and Miri observes that Leah seems less troubled when submerged. The bath allows Leah to partially return to the element that has claimed her, providing temporary relief from the pain of existing on land. But the bath is also a site of danger: it is where Leah's screams and convulsions occur, and where Miri finds her vomiting water. The bath is both sanctuary and threat.
3. How does Jelka's death function as a form of erasure?
Jelka's body is expelled from the craft while submerged, and her sister Juna is informed via letter that the body was disposed of as was regulation. Jelka is reduced to a bureaucratic procedure, her death a matter of policy rather than grief. The novel uses Jelka's fate to show that erosion is not only psychological but also institutional: the Centre's procedures erase the dead as effectively as the ocean erases footprints.
4. What is the significance of Leah's difficulty recalling Miri's name in chapter 25?
The name is the anchor of Leah's identity above water. When she struggles to dredge the name from the bottom of my mind, the novel shows that the erosion of memory has reached the deepest level of her self-conception. Miri is not just a person Leah loves; she is the person who defines Leah's life on land. The loss of her name signals that Leah's connection to the surface world is dissolving.
5. How does the novel's ending complicate the theme of erosion?
The ending is ambiguous. Leah's body dissolves into the sea, suggesting the completion of the erosion process. But her account of the ascent, in which she and Matteo surface after appealing to the creature, suggests the erosion may have been a choice—a surrender rather than a destruction. The creature's anticipatory expression implies the dissolution was expected, perhaps even intended. The novel leaves open whether Leah's erasure is a tragedy, a transformation, or something in between.