The sea has long been viewed as a feminine force, recorded in myths and legends as powerful and dangerous. Ships are called ‘she’ and feminised with figureheads of Greek goddesses to protect them. Not only is the sea herself feminine but often so too are the mysterious creatures who inhabit her. These creatures have long been part of oral tradition, tracking our love and fear of the ocean over time. From childhood we become familiar with Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid and tales of selkies from the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. We grow up associating women with oceans. Later, when we are older we encounter The Odyssey by Homer, either by reading it ourselves or coming across representations in modern culture. In this ancient tale, the sirens are cast as a threat, taking pleasure in killing men. This violent portrayal of a feminine ocean is no accident. It comes from a tradition of some Western tales that are deeply misogynistic, showing a disregard both for women and the waters associated with them. But writers have long been aware of this stereotype and have sought to reconfigure and reimagine it.
Photo by Michael Vince Kim
Here is a reading stack if you’re looking to deep dive into women’s link with the sea.
The Fabled Coast: Legends & Traditions From Around the Shores of Britain & Ireland by Sophia Kingshill & Jennifer Westwood
Every culture that has links to the sea has told stories about it. These tales have largely been of conquest rather than coexistence. Vengeful mermaids kill sailors. Selkie brides abandon their husbands and children for the call of the sea. The message is abuse nature at your peril, but we continue to live imbalanced with the sea. In this detailed collection two renowned women folklorists, Kingshill and Westwood, retell folktales from around Britain and Ireland that relate to the sea. They recount the story of a wealthy woman who appears at church then vanishes into the sea, tales of women pirates, and tell of the belief that when the tide comes in a child is born and is it ebbs someone will die. This compendium gives an idea of the scope and variety of the old tales about the sea from just a few islands. It is organised geographically so you can dive into the places you know best or explore new waters.
Mermaids by Sophie Kingshill
Mermaids have long captured people’s imaginations but apart from their tails across legends they differ wildly. Kingshill’s slight book - ideal to fit in a large pocket - is a detailed account of the mermaid tracking from our time to the ancient world. It is also overflowing with illustrations women with tales throughout history. Mermaids and their sisters have traditionally been highly sexualised. Kingshill draws our attention to this by pointing it out over time, as well as giving examples like the Copenhagen statue of The Little Mermaid who has been defaced many times, including her head being sawn off as a form of protest against her sexualised image. Kingshill ends with this message: DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCH! DON’T GIVE UP YOUR LIFE, TAKE CENTRE STAGE!
The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan
The way in which folklore mixes with our world can be subtle and magical, the lines blur. This is nowhere more apparent than in contemporary magical realist fiction. Kirsty Logan’s novel The Gloaming melds our world with the magical and less understood underworld of the waves. Set on a Scottish island, where the sea and island itself hold power over the characters. Mara, the protagonist knows she’ll eventually end her days atop the cliff, turned to stone and gazing out at the horizon like all the villagers, drawn by the otherworldly call of the sea. Then one day Mara meets a woman who has a job as a mermaid. This is a present-day fable told in language that shimmers.
salt slow by Julia Armfield
Feminist, magical realist short stories are in many ways contemporary folktales. Often they play with the elements of folktale but are firmly rooted in a modern context. Sometimes these types of short stories will subvert folktales making them understandable and relevant for readers today. Short stories can arguably examine taboo with a playful experimentation that is harder to retain in the length of a novel. In salt slow author Julia Armfield explores women’s bodies, blurring the mythic and gothic with the contemporary British life. ‘Smack’ depicts a sleepy sea-side town is invaded and transformed, creating a landscape constantly shifting to hold on to hold on to its inhabitants. In the titular and last story, a couple are afloat on the sea of a waterworld dystopia while the woman waits to give birth to a sea creature.
Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie
The sea can have a very personal connection for us, one that we find hard to grasp and name but is ever present in our lives. This is what Charlotte Runcie’s Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea explores. It’s a memoir about motherhood that intertwines effortlessly with tales and histories of the sea. Runcie poetically elucidates women’s deep and eternal connection to the ocean, signalling how it mirrors our bodies as her own grows with a child. This is a beautiful and quiet read with a power and weight like all tales about the sea.
The Seas by Samantha Hunt
Sometimes it can feel like the sea offers all the answers to the problems and complexities of our landed lives. It whispers and sings to us in a voice that may know all the answers. This is explored in Samantha Hunt’s novel The Seas, a story about being two things at once. The narrator of the novel, a nineteen-year-old girl may or may not be a mermaid. Trapped in a seaside town where she works as a chambermaid, she is in love with an Iraq veteran thirteen years her senior and suffering from PTSD. This is a creepy and precisely told story that revolves around the ocean: its potential for magic and to wash up the past.
Diving Belles by Lucy Wood
Our connection to the sea has always been linked to our connection with the land. In Diving Belles Lucy Wood explores our links between land and sea with stories firmly rooted on Cornwall’s coast. In one story a shipwreck salvager invades a couple’s home bringing with him seawater, sand and humidity. Soon tiny shells are pouring out of the bathroom taps instead of water. The title story is perhaps the most fascinating. Fishermen keep disappearing to live a life as mermen under the sea so an entrepreneur woman sets up a business where women can wear diving belles in order to go beneath the waves and get their husbands back, even if only temporarily. In this collection land and sea merge in beautiful and surprising ways, reminding us how integral both our to our existence.
Molly Aitken’s The Island Child is out in the UK on 30 January 2020, published by Canongate.