Water Women explores the relationship that female agency and autonomy have with bodies of water in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century. Drawing on a corpus of poetry, poetic prose, and visual culture by more than twenty authors and artists from Spain, Galicia, Catalonia, Cuba, and Colombia, the book is situated at the intersection of gender studies and new materialisms. It uncovers the ways that a bodily or affective relationship with water creates space for female literary figures to exist outside of the structures of contemporary political and scientific thought-structures that depend on a fabricated biological necessity for woman’s natural purity and subjugation.

In these pages, the sea seduces, overwhelms, and provides safe harbor. Women love, lose, labour, end their lives, and live free as monsters who are one with the waves. Water Women details the edge of the water as a space of liminality, an entry into the water as an assertion of freedom, suicide in the water as an inversion of Ophelia’s passive madness, and the role of feminine non-human creatures like sirens and undines in creating a commentary on society’s impossible expectations. Through the profound relationship between the natural world and the human, this book opens space for diverse embodiments and performances of gender, agency, and eroticism within our understanding of the nineteenth century.