Home > The Deep Summary & Study Guide

The Deep | Introduction

"The Deep," a novella by Canadian writer Mary Swan, was first published in the Canadian literary journal The Malahat Review in 2000. This story won the 2001 O. Henry Award for short fiction. "The Deep" has been republished in several books, including a collection of Swan's short fiction, The Deep and Other Stories (2004).

"The Deep" is a haunting tale about the life and death of twin sisters during World War I. The story is a complex weave of historical themes such as women's involvement in the war effort and more universal themes such as dysfunctional families. This story also explores the unique bond between identical twins. Swan has been writing and publishing short stories in the United States and Canada since the 1980s; "The Deep" is her most widely read and best-received work as of 2005.

The Deep Summary

After

"The Deep" begins with the description of a room with tall windows and gauzy curtains. This first section is short, ending with a memory of a story about a queen's funeral.

How to Begin

An unnamed narrator describes what it is like to wake up uncertain of who and where one is. While the narrator is asleep, it may be 1918 France.

Survival Suit

The unnamed narrators, twins, are preparing to leave on a journey requiring camp equipment and vaccinations. They have lunch with Miss Reilly, who gives them each a pen so they will write her letters. The twins spend the next day with their father. He is terrified about their boat passage and insists on buying them survival suits. The twins are reminded of their doll Ophelia whom they tried unsuccessfully to float in a stream.

The Castle

The twins remember their mother as a sad woman and matter-of-factly state that they killed her—by being born. Their mother was distant from them, always resting. There is an implication that she suffered from postpartum depression. The twins' older brothers despised them for making their mother ill.

When the twins were young they went crawling through the kitchen garden, pretending to be an imprisoned princess. A fair-haired, blue-eyed prince riding a white horse would come to the rescue. He looked just like their father did as a young man. Their father smelled of the city: "cigars and dust and ashes." They thought he did not care about them but when they were older they realize he probably just does not know what to do with daughters.

The Corporal Remembers

Corporal Easton describes the twin girls as "skittish white horses."

The Fountain

The twins recall two portraits of their mother, one a formal painting, the other a sketch. In the sketch their mother wears a yellow dress and sits by a fountain with her sons, Marcus and James. The painting entrances the twins, "like a window to another world, and it seemed quite possible that by staring hard enough, we could step right through." When they are old enough to figure it out, the date on this painting indicates that their mother was pregnant with them when she posed for the artist. They realize, "we were already growing beneath that yellow dress, getting ready to smash that world to pieces."

The twins recall how the fountain was demolished and replaced by a flower bed. When they were very young the girl watching them fell asleep. As the twins remember it, unsupervised they played under the water, finding "absolute silence and peace" there. The final image is of two people carrying two bodies dripping wet and laying them on a stone. This image of the girls drowned foreshadows (or anticipates) their later double suicide.

Mrs. Moore

Mrs. Moore remembers the twins, Ruth and Esther, as serious-natured. She says they hung out with a young man who was handsome and funny. Mrs. Moore implies that he was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease. After he left the interim camp he would stop by to visit the twins, to work "that charm of his" on them. She recalls how strangely identical the sisters were, even individually referring to themselves as "we." Mrs. Moore speculates that maybe they both fell for that young man.

The Headmistress—1

The headmistress, Miss Reilly, recalls a meeting with the twins' father in which he implores her to convince his daughters not to go abroad. She refuses on the grounds that the twins are adults. But inwardly she feels some guilt. The headmistress and the father first met fifteen years earlier when he enrolled his daughters as pupils. He and the headmistress felt an immediate connection.

She considers something that has recently happened to be her fault. She remembers the letters she wrote to the twins, reassuring them in their work abroad but feels that she missed seeing something in their letters. Lastly the headmistress remembers a young lover who went to Africa after she refused to marry him. He died of a fever there. She would not marry him because she thought she needed an education and that marriage would deter her from that path.

Sailing

The twins stand on board, watching their father wave goodbye. His frantic waving makes them think they are seeing his real self. He has always moved slowly but now he is frenetic, just as he was the day their mother died and he raced up the stairs. The twins watch their father grow smaller as the ship sails away. They wonder why this departure should be such a big deal since they've been to Europe before.

On the ship the twins meet Elizabeth. She readily talks about herself, telling the twins that she volunteered so that she could look for her brother Arthur, who drives ambulances. His family has not heard from him in over six months. The twins are struck by how different their own family is. Their brother Marcus was too busy to come to the dock and their brother James was killed in action already. They remember James coming home to get some things after he enlisted. James was full of bravado but when he put another log on the fire, he burned his finger. The twins saw his tears and asked if he was afraid and he said that he was. Their sadness over his death is not for love but for the lack of it.

Life is different in camp, running the canteen. Everything they are occupied with is much more concrete—headaches, food shortages, sore feet, missing soldiers.

The Headmistress—2

Miss Reilly recalls first meeting the twins when they interviewed to attend her school: "[T]here was no hesitation, no collision, conversation flowing easily from one or the other so that the effect was of talking to a single person." She refers to news about the twins, mentions a memorial service. She looks at an old portrait of them taken a couple years after they started school. The photographer, Mr. Jones, failed to capture the essence of the twins in separate portraits and had to pose them together.

Letter

The letter is from the twins to their father. They thank him for sending gifts and tell him that they are close to the front, staffing a canteen at an interim camp. They describe their daily routine and the people they work with—primarily Mrs. Moore and Berthe. Although the work is hard, they feel it is important. On their free day they go to nearby hospitals and volunteer.

Stain

The twins remember their mother died on a Sunday morning in early June. Someone cried out and everyone went running to her room. Their father dropped his ink pen as he dashed up the stairs and Mrs. B picked it up. The pen made a stain in her apron pocket that spread as if "slowly to cover [the twins'] whole lives."

Marcus

Marcus remembers, on the day the girls were born, being called home from school because his mother was dying. He... » Complete The Deep Summary