Odd Couples: "The Shape of Water," "Selkie Stories Are for Losers"

Sofia Samatar at the Les Imaginales a Epinal festival (2017).

With Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water raking in some well-deserved Oscar nominations, I’d like to pair it with another awards nominee about surf-and-turf romance. Sofia Samatar’s 2013 short story “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy, and Samatar herself won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. We love short speculative fiction like this here at Fiction Unbound! The story revolves around the figure of the selkie of Irish and Scottish folklore, a seal-woman who becomes human on land. Warning: Spoilers for The Shape of Water to follow.

In the selkie myth’s classic form, a man comes upon a selkie basking on the rocks out of her seal skin, in the form of a human woman. He steals the skin and marries the woman, and they start a happy family. Years later, she discovers the skin—through the man’s carelessness, or his faith in the marriage they’ve built, or her child’s discovery. At once, she slips on the skin and vanishes back into the sea. The ruthless immediacy of her escape is the selkie story’s defining emotion. There’s no twinge of ambivalence in her decision; the family she’s loved and nourished has, in the end, zero pull on her. As Samatar’s narrator sums it up:

They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said "What's this?", and you never saw your mom again.

You can read all sorts of anthropological speculations about the selkie story’s origins here. And they are closely related to stories about mermaids in myth. Maybe the early Scots spotted Inuit women laying out waterlogged sealskin clothing to dry. Sure. For me, the selkie story’s staying power is masculine insecurity: a guilt over the way husbands trap and cage their wives in patriarchal arrangements. Or maybe it’s a story men tell each other about how ‘inscrutable’ women are. Or a warning by the wives, not to take them for granted. Maybe it’s just an anxiety about love, that it’s fragile beyond comprehension.

In “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” Samatar dives headlong into that fragility. The narrator’s mother is (probably) literally a selkie, who has abandoned her husband and daughter at the beginning of the story. The narrator’s friend Mona also has a selkie mother, of sorts: an Egyptian immigrant, divorced, isolated, Mona’s mother is a stranger in a strange land who has tried twice to slip away—by suicide. Then there’s the love budding between the narrator and Mona, and the narrator’s desperation to hold on to her. She starts to feel like one of the “losers” in her stories, chasing after his seal-wife:

The man ran to catch her, he even kissed her even though she was already a seal, but she squirmed off down the road and flopped into the water. The man stood knee-deep in the chilly waves, stinking of fish, and cried. In selkie stories, kissing never solves anything. No transformation happens because of a kiss. No one loves you just because you love them. What kind of fairy tale is that?

Now Playing From master story teller, Guillermo del Toro, comes THE SHAPE OF WATER - an other-worldly fable, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of isolation.

But Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water may be just that kind of fairy tale: a reverse selkie story, maybe. There, the fish out of water is the Amphibious Man, a humanoid mudskipper wrested from the Amazon basin and brought to a mid-century U.S. research facility. The one who falls in love is Eliza, a cleaning lady at the facility, who rescues him and returns him to the water. Like in a selkie story, it’s a romance across unbridgeable worlds: the one a prisoner on land, the other unable to follow into the water. Water enforces the selkie’s Otherness—makes the romance tragic and terminal, as we fear all love affairs are.

But del Toro flips the genders and the genre, so that it’s a woman’s great act of love to free her beloved, not to keep him captive. The vicious cycle that characterizes the men in selkie stories—control and fear of losing control—belongs to the white, cishet, male villain, while the rescue team Eliza assembles is all misfit avengers, people marginalized and devalued in the Cold War’s hyperpatriarchy. Del Toro shows as little ambiguity about this as a seal-wife: that need to control others destroys and imprisons everyone, including the villain; the ability to let go saves everyone, including Eliza.

Eliza meets the Amphibious Man (via LRM)

There’s a stunning image that captures this, when Eliza turns on all the taps and floods her bathroom so that she can join her lover in his element. The water pours through the door jamb; it climbs up to the ceiling, and Eliza takes a breath and plunges into her makeshift fishtank. In the theater, I freaked out: the wood damage, the neighbors, jeez there goes her deposit! But it’s an image of thriving in fragility, of beauty inside impossibility, of letting control slip away.

The Shape of Water is a canny project of reversals and transgressions that builds a new mythology—a better selkie story, one for the losers.

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