In Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home”, the narrator tells the tale of her
husband’s fishing trip with his friends where they discovered a dead, naked woman. Claire
is suspicious of Stuart, because he and his friends did not report the girl until the end of
their trip. Carver’s treatment of gender follows a specific pattern throughout the story: he
places the genders on opposite extremes in terms of morality, creating an almost binary
opposition where men are seen as ignorant and women as compassionate. For instance, the
delay in reporting the body is caused by the need to show male dominance. When they
found the girl after their trip to the fishing site, the men “stirred the sand with their shoes
and said they felt inclined to stay. They pleaded fatigue, the late hour, the fact that the girl
‘wasn’t going anywhere’. In the end they all decided to stay” (Carver 175). No one of
Stuart’s friends want to be the one to call the trip short, which demonstrates a passive fight
to prove their masculinity to one another.
Carver portrays men as insensitive while women are portrayed as compassionate. When
the men found the dead girl after a day of walking, they let their fatigue, indifference, and
callousness take control of the situation. They thought that the best solution was to tie her
up so that she does not float away. The author seems to be making the point of the flawed
morality and the lack of wise judgment of the men. Their lack of concern for the deceased
girl is translated into a lack of concern for all people, thus making the men seem like
unethical individuals who have put their physical state of fatigue and tiredness above the
condition of a poor, deceased girl. Even when Stuart returns home from his trip, he does
not tell Claire about the girl until after having a drink, sex, and a good night’s rest. As if
waiting to report the girl was not bad enough, coming back home and going about his life
as if nothing had happened facilitates the emphasis on the lack of morals of the male
characters.
Throughout the story the audience is able to see gender violence through the eyes of
Claire; the entire tale is told in her point of view. When Stuart senses his wife’s suspicion,
he tells her, “I won’t have you passing judgment on me. Not you” (Carver 173). This
