When I first read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I was straight. Or, at least I thought I was. It was 2014, and I was a sixteen-year-old closeted bisexual in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with nothing to my name but a mildly successful hipster-themed Tumblr blog. The novel’s ending, in which Edna walks confidently into the sea and presumably drowns, left its mark on me. I couldn’t shake the image it conjured: a grown woman, defeated and determined, descending into the waves until there is none of her left. At the time, I chalked up my obsession with this ending to its overall melodrama and second-wave feminist messaging. It took a decade and a queer awakening of my own to understand the real reason I couldn’t seem to let it go.
In the past year or two, I’ve seen parts of this ending reflected in piece after piece of queer media. From novels to TV shows to music videos, there it is: this very dramatic, very wet end. A descent into the water, an ambiguous death, a life or lover left behind—it’s all there. In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, destined for life underwater. And the lover left behind is almost always queer.
It’s quite a specific trope to encounter upwards of five times in the span of a few years. While there’s certainly more queer representation in media than there used to be, it’s still undeniably a much smaller genre—an island of queer stories amongst oceans of hetero romance. Smaller still is the percentage of these stories that spotlight sapphic love between queer women and non-binary people. So it feels significant, and more than just an odd coincidence, that multiple fairly popular sapphic stories released in the last five years hinge on this strange plot point.
In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, destined for life underwater.
I first recognized it as a trope when watching The Haunting of Bly Manor. Like many young lesbians in the fall of 2020, I spent two days in October glued to my couch, binge-watching the new Netflix miniseries. New sapphic romance in mainstream media is not an everyday event, so when I heard whispers on social media of the new gothic drama featuring WLW love, I didn’t walk: I ran.
Though Dani and Jamie’s romance is briefly a sweet, infrequently seen picture of lesbian domesticity, it comes to a harrowing, wet end in the season finale. Dani, who’s spent the last decade growing increasingly possessed by the evil Lady of the Lake, makes the decision to leave for Jamie’s safety and retreat back to the lake on the manor. Like Edna in The Awakening, she walks steadfast into the water. Though rather than presume she drowned, we understand her to live on as the new Lady of the Lake. The following scene, in which Jamie swims into the water to find her wife asleep on the lake’s bed, is one of pure sapphic suffering—a wailing woman, weeping for the loss of her wife.
Then there it is again in Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea: After Miri’s wife, Leah, returns from a submarine mission gone wrong, she watches as Leah slowly transforms from her charismatic, loving wife into a sea creature of sorts—drinking salt water, bathing for hours, shedding human skin. Something happened in that submarine that changed Leah forever, and Miri cannot get her back. She is, instead, forced to carry her into the sea and watch as her wife swims away.
In Chlorine, the 2023 debut novel by Jade Song, we see it yet again. Ren, a talented teenage athlete, grows so obsessive over her competitive swimming career that her childhood fascination with mermaids takes on a life of its own, and the line between human girl and mermaid blurs to the point of no return. Meanwhile, the novel’s other protagonist, Cathy, endures the queerest of fates: falling desperately in unrequited love with Ren, her best friend. Ultimately, it is Cathy who must deliver Ren-the-mermaid to a creek, and watch as she swims underwater without resurfacing.
Jamie, Miri, and Cathy all have no choice but to helplessly witness the deterioration of their lovers as they turn from a human woman to something not-quite—something whose home was no longer in them, but in the water.
As someone who has experienced the heart-wrenching, all-consuming emotional nightmare of one’s first lesbian breakup, the pain these queer characters endure by losing their relationship in communion with the loss of the person themselves sounds insurmountable to me, which may be part of why I recognized this repeating theme in the first place. Heartbreak is by no means exclusively queer, but one could argue that lesbians have somewhat of a monopoly on yearning—of which this trope begets plenty. In all of these stories, there is a refusal to let go that is decidedly sapphic. An unending yearning that is emboldened by the ambiguous loss of the lovers—they are both gone and not. They live on in the water, and their lovers are left to blindly hope for their return.
One could argue that lesbians have somewhat of a monopoly on yearning.
In Bly Manor’s finale, it’s revealed that the show’s omniscient narrator is Jamie herself, telling her and Dani’s story some twenty-five years later. It’s been decades since she lost her wife, and still we watch Jamie sleep with her door open just a crack, in case of Dani’s return. Still she runs a bath and fills the sink at night, in case Dani is called to the water, I Shall Believe by Sherly Crow playing softly in the background.
When Ren swims away from Cathy in Chlorine, instead of letting go and moving on, Cathy does the gayest thing one could: writes love letters. These love letters are more than just a coping mechanism for her grief—they’re an earnest attempt to communicate with Ren underwater, regularly depositing messages-in-bottles into the creek with hope Ren the mermaid will write back. In one of her letters to Ren, she writes, “Remember, remember, remember? Feels like all I do is remember the times I had with you.”
It’s dark, quite frankly. Both Cathy and Jamie are stuck living their lives in the past. This level of devotion blurs the line between romantic and pathetic, love and purpose, independence and codependence. And yet—such is lesbianism. Nothing has ever distorted my sense of self and purpose quite like queer love, which is precisely why I think this trope has found its home in queer media. It provides the perfect stage for the darkest, most vulnerable parts of sapphic love to shine.
Even Chappell Roan is in on the metaphor: in the “Casual” music video, Roan’s love for a sexy siren develops quickly and forcefully, from sharing a popsicle on the beach to making out with her in a pool. Over the course of the video, we see Roan’s character transform herself into what (she thinks) the siren wants—dressing in bluer tones, giving her bedroom a sea-themed makeover, even turning a blind eye to the siren’s murderous tendencies. All of this just to be abandoned by the siren in the end, and of course: watch as she retreats into the sea. The sapphic yearning is desperate here—just as it is in Bly Manor, Our Wives, and Chlorine—to the point where these queer characters are willing to abandon common sense. They believe the unbelievable because the love, the want, feels so good.
The mythical nature of these lovers (the siren, the mermaid, the sea creature, the possessed) intensifies the queer love within the stories, extending it past reality. Without the fantastical element, the loss of these characters to the water would be matter-of-fact. It would just be…death. Instead, magical realism creates a layer of ambiguity to the losses, allowing the longing to be theatrical and placing queer love on a bigger scale, for all its complexities and pieces to be seen up-close.
For the human-half of these relationships, taking care of a lover-turned-mythical-creature seems instinctual. In Bly Manor, Jamie spends the majority of her marriage compensating for Dani’s deteriorating self and memory. “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us,” she says. In Our Wives, Miri tends to Leah day and night in the bathtub, where she’s most comfortable. She dissolves tablespoons of salt into water for her to drink, bandages her face when her human eye is lost. In the “Casual” music video, Roan intimately bathes her murderous, shark-toothed siren.
The trope provides the perfect stage for the darkest, most vulnerable parts of sapphic love to shine.
In each instance, love is an active effort. As said in Bly Manor, “To truly love another person is to accept the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” The way in which each of these stories refer to love as “work” is purposeful; the work may not be effortless, but when so deeply entrenched in queer love, it feels natural.
There is something to be said for the unspoken way in which a queer lover is often able to anticipate the wants and needs of their partner. The effect is a blurring of bodies and hearts—I am made up of you and you are made up of me. The question of adopting the caretaker role through their partner’s transformation is not a question at all, but rather a raw determination to channel the intensity of love into action.
Maybe this is why the lover-lost-to-water trope is surfacing in so many queer narratives, like dots waiting to be connected, or breadcrumbs on the trail. The love we are capable of as queer women and non-binary people is like the sea, unwieldy and vast, and the consequence of losing this love is just as unpredictable and terrifying—which all of these authors and artists tap into and lay bare in their heartbroken characters.
I see in them the parts of myself I shrink from—the parts I like to pretend don’t exist within me, lurking. Jamie’s helplessness, Miri’s detachment, Cathy’s desperation, Roan’s codependence, all triggered by loss and change. And yet, just as clearly, I see the parts I revel in—the hopeful feeling of unending, easy love. Of yearning satiated. It is the kind of representation I hope to see more of as queer literature and media continue to expand—raw and dark, beautiful and truthful, yet done in a way that plays with the unknown. And what is more unknown than the sea?
In The Awakening, Chopin writes, “…[Edna] was beginning to recognize her relations to the world within and about her… [the] voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring… the touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” Aside from this being the most sapphic description of the sea I’ve ever read, I like to think Chopin intended more for Edna’s final moment than death. I like to think she inspired a generation of queers to play with the boundaries of love and yearning—of wanting more—just as she did.
