The Light Between Oceans, written by M. L. Stedman, follows the life of a lighthouse keeper Tom and his wife, Isabel, as they reside on the tiny island of Janus. Isabel has many miscarriages, after which she finds a baby washed up on shore, whom they keep as their own. Through the language of nature and light, Stedman illustrates how motherhood and miscarriage have the power to tear people apart. While love can help to bridge that gap, ultimately, everyone is isolated with their own thoughts, and while love can protect us, no one is free from the impartiality of nature and truth.
Isabel is a woman born to be a mother, just as Tom was born to be a soldier, and later, a lightkeeper. Isabel demonstrates the warmth and care of a mother, yet when disturbed, her emotions spiral out of control. To Tom, motherhood is “a mysterious business” which Isabel is “utterly single-minded about” (66). In Isabel’s eyes, motherhood is simply a part of nature: when women become pregnant, their hormones shift, which makes them more sensitive and prepares them to bond with their child. However, Tom doesn’t have the same feelings: men often don’t feel the fatherly rush of love and care until they bond with their children after birth. Following her miscarriages, Isabel is utterly crushed by the loss of a child whom she loved, while Tom is mainly concerned about Isabel’s well-being. Tom, being a military man, is logical and honest, and doesn’t experience grief the same way. This initiates the disconnect between Tom and Isabel. While Tom and Isabel will always love each other, they can never fully comprehend the other’s point of view.
To highlight the separation between the two, Stedman utilizes descriptions of their setting. Tom and Isabel live on the tiny island of Janus, named for a god with “two faces, back to back.” He’s the god of doorways, and is “always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things,” just as “the island looks in the direction of two different oceans” (65). The one thing connecting these two oceans is the island Janus, and more importantly, the lighthouse. This light keeps people safe; as Isabel says, it “can reach ahead in time to save the ship before it knows it needs help” (56). This light is the same as the love that Tom has for Isabel, and that Isabel has for their adopted child, Lucy. While this love can’t actually connect everyone or keep them safe forever, it can offer some protection and a sense of security.
Two weeks after Isabel’s last miscarriage, a boat washes up on shore containing a baby and a man’s body. Isabel, who is still awash with motherly-love chemicals, insists that they keep the baby, and Tom complies out of love for Isabel. As Isabel took care of the child, she “knew instinctively how to hold the child,” and “the moment seemed to merge into one with another bathing, another face--a single act that had merely been interrupted” (86). For Isabel, this child fills the emptiness of losing a child: she’s able to transfer her feelings for her lost unborn child onto this stranger. Just as the lighthouse’s “lens doesn’t care which light it magnifies,” Isabel’s motherly love and hormones don’t care which child they’re directed at (57). From Isabel’s perspective, she sees this as an act of God, impossible to occur by chance. This viewpoint doesn’t align with Tom’s rigid view of the world, where he feels that he doesn’t deserve the life of a child after witnessing hundreds of deaths in the war. Tom sees things mathematically, balancing out life and death, and he feels obligated to fulfill his duties as lightkeeper. He believes in truth and justice more than the subjective views of “right” or “wrong.” As the baby, Lucy, grows older, Isabel feels like the mother of the child as she has raised Lucy and kept her safe, whereas Tom feels that Lucy’s biological mother, Hannah, deserves the child out of justice and honesty.
In order to further augment the sense of separation between Tom and Isabel, Stedman highlights the enormity of the ocean and other entities, as well as their isolation on the island. The ocean was described as “only vastness, all the way to Africa…[it] stretched like an edgeless carpet below the cliffs” (3). Regarding the body of Isabel’s miscarried child, she notes “the vastness, the tiny body, eternity.” This vastness also brings about reverence and a sense of helplessness: humans are at the mercy of nature. Tom witnessed many deaths caused by humans throughout the war, but “the quietness of this one” was too much for him: “to see a child torn away from his mother at the very moment of birth...was a more dreadful kind of pain” (93). Nature doesn’t care for love or hope: it is evenhanded, bringing death and causing pain for those who may not deserve it. In the same way, the truth is impartial to care and emotions. The truth merely provides the fact that Lucy is Hannah’s child; it doesn’t offer a “right” or a “wrong” solution to whether or not Tom and Isabel should keep Lucy. Truth has no sense of the love that Isabel has for Lucy, the unfairness of her miscarriages, the grief that Hannah feels when she fears Lucy is lost forever, and Isabel’s grief when she must return Lucy.
While Tom and Isabel have very different opinions, their love for Lucy eventually bring them together and helps them cope with the loss of Lucy, just as their lighthouse saves ships from crashing into the rocks of Janus. Isabel’s role as a mother, and the cycle of hope and grief created by miscarriages, leads her to value her relationship with Lucy above all else. Tom, on the other hand, is molded by his experiences in the war, and instead views honesty and justice as most important. To enhance this feeling of separation, Stedman forces each character to struggle with the impartial forces of nature and truth. Nature takes Isabel’s children away, yet sends Lucy to her, and truth forces Tom to give Lucy back to Hannah, yet fixes Hannah’s broken family. Through these two forces, Stedman advances the idea that there is no “right” or “wrong:” both Tom and Isabel's feelings and opinions are equally valid.
