by Mattea Gernentz

“Like a deep woman, [the sea] hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill.” -Sylvia Plath

On January 25, 1882, Virginia Woolf, one of the most remarkable modernist writers, entered the world. The sea figured largely into her childhood, and its presence remained with her strongly as she wrote some of her finest works: To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, and The Waves. Woolf grew up in St Ives and spent the summers of her youth in Cornwall, returning frequently later in life due to her bouts of ill health. She had a fondness for rereading Melville’s Moby Dick and viewed the flux and changeability of ocean waves as a source of both danger and comfort. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf writes of her protagonist, "she had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.” However, Woolf’s longstanding affinity for the sea is not entirely unique. Other women poets and writers throughout history seem to have gravitated to its enigmatic pull as well, and the sea itself is often regarded as feminine.

In both French and Romanian, the sea is referred to as a feminine noun: la mer and la mare. The Greeks believed that Aphrodite sprang from the sea’s foam, as portrayed in Sandro Botticelli’s famous classical portrait, The Birth of Venus. In Homer’s The Odyssey, the powerful enchantress Circe abides on an island and mermaid-like sirens tempt passing sailors. Scottish mythology also appears to associate the ocean with mystical feminine figures, such as selkies and kelpies—shape-shifting beings who can navigate the separate spheres of sea and land. Anne Carson writes in "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity" that the feminine nature has been associated since antiquity with confounding boundaries and “wetness.” Hippocrates thought of women as beings who thrive in an “environment of water” among things “cold and wet and soft.” Emotion too, in many senses, was thought of by the Greeks—and, later, those in the Medieval era—as liquid, which contributed to the rise of humorism.

In “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea,” the famed confessional poet Sylvia Plath explores similar themes to those Anne Carson identifies:

Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair

Tangling in the tide's green fall

Now fold their wings like bats and disappear

Into the attic of the skull.

We are not what we might be; what we are

Outlaws all extrapolation

Beyond the interval of now and here:

White whales are gone with the white ocean.

A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack

Of kaleidoscope shells

Probing fractured Venus with a stick

Under a tent of taunting gulls.

Her images of “a maze mermaid hair” and “fractured Venus” evoke this same mysterious link between the ocean and the feminine. Plath’s “We are not what we might be; what we are / outlaws all extrapolation” also seems to speak to Carson’s point regarding the ability of women to defy traditional paradigms and categorization, an attribute which incited fear in Greek men. This phrasing could also be viewed as an interesting inversion of Ophelia’s “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” in Act IV of Hamlet, a woman who met her premature end in a body of water.

In one of her prose essays, the American writer Mary Oliver details that nearly all of her poems are written outdoors, with all at least beginning to be formed while wandering in nature. Her poems take on similar themes: contemplation, the seasons, and careful observations of wildlife. It is incredible that while she has numerous poems, for example, focusing just on birds, each is wildly rich with some gem of truth or philosophical takeaway. She writes also of the sea: in “Breakage,” she describes the ocean as “a schoolhouse / of little words, / thousands of words.” More and more, I believe this sentiment is true for I know the sea still has much to teach me, with gulls and fish and barnacles allowing the “whole story,” as Oliver describes, to unfold.

"as sometimes at sunset / the rosyfingered moon / surpasses all the stars. And her light / stretches over salt sea / equally and flowerdeep fields'' — Sappho

I have never before lived in such close proximity to the sea. In my childhood, I wandered the forests and meadows of Tennessee, sometimes exploring creeks with my best friend to capture salamanders or crawfish. Rarely, my family would pile into our car and drive upwards of seven hours to get to Florida, where we would ride bikes in the sun, peruse local shops, and rush into the roaring surf. During my six months in St Andrews, I have wondered what effect place will have on my own writing. I have made a habit of going on frigid walks around twilight to stare at the waves, marking their ebb and flow and gentle mirroring of the sky. The waves’ dance is chaotic and yet dependable, able to be charted yet altogether unrestrained. I can see why the sea has been feared throughout the ages and myself hold for it a mélange of awe, adoration, and trepidation at its magnitude.

So, I suppose I am partaking in an age-old tradition, one perhaps begun by Sappho in ancient Greece: a woman feeling connected to the sea, learning from it, and writing about it. I find this intellectual and creative heritage deeply comforting, and, during lockdown, I have been especially pondering these lines from 2020 Nobel laureate Louise Glück’s Vita Nova:

I thrived. I lived

not completely alone, alone

but not completely, strangers

surging around me.

That's what the sea is:

we exist in secret.

ST. ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.