So Much Water So Close to Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide references the graphic murders of women and features ambiguously consensual sex as well as general misogyny.

The story provides no physical description or backstory for its protagonist. Carver does not assign her an age, a race, a socioeconomic status, or any distinctive features. She functions as a wife and mother, and whether she occupies any other roles in society is not clear. Claire’s flat, matter-of-fact manner of narration is characteristic of Carver’s characters. Because Claire narrates the story, however, readers are positioned to sympathize with her, and her unremarkability makes her an “every woman” figure, suggesting that all women are at risk of falling victim to men’s violent advances. Claire’s attendance at the murdered woman’s funeral shows she not only feels compassion for the woman but identifies with her. She too believes she could be prey for a murderer—possibly even her own husband. In this context, her tone, which is at once flat and guarded, implies trauma (though not necessarily more severe trauma than is typical of Gender Norms’ Harmful Effects on Women); she recounts her story emotionlessly, but she also leaves a good deal unsaid. Most notably, she only implies the depth of her revulsion toward her husband, which is perhaps too painful to confront openly (particularly as she allows his sexual advances in the story’s final scene).

Claire is primarily characterized via her thoughts, which reveal her distrust of her husband and general fear of men, highlighting The Pervasiveness of Doubt and Deception. Besides Stuart, she speaks to only two other characters, both women. In both exchanges, she keeps her anxiety about the murdered woman mostly private, though the body becomes a subject of conversation both times. While the story does not feature any interactions between Claire and her son, she appears to be a caring and protective mother; in the note she writes to her son before going to the murdered woman’s funeral, she addresses him as “Honey” and cautions him to stay within either the house or the yard. She quite literally underscores her care for him: “I look at the word Love and then I underline it” (85). Her insistence on the word recalls Stuart’s previous use of it in a note to Claire, suggesting that she doubts that Stuart’s feelings are genuine but wants her son to know that her feelings for him are true.