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.

Rivers, and therefore water, are a source of danger closely associated with Gender Norms’ Harmful Effects on Women. This association first appears when the men discover the woman’s body at the Naches River. They ultimately take steps to prevent her body from being washed away by the river, suggesting that it acts as another predator capable of erasing the woman’s existence. The Naches furthers the gender divide, as it is a territory occupied and controlled by men, while women are outsiders and intruders. Claire associates rivers with violence against women, recalling the murder of a girl whose body was recovered from the Cle Elum River when she was young herself (83); that the body was headless reinforces the link between water and loss of not only life but also identity. Claire tells Stuart this as they sit on the bank of Everson Creek, but he is unfazed. She then “look[s] at the creek” to find herself “right in it, eyes open, face down, staring at the moss on the bottom, dead” (83).