Dept. of Speculation explores how married life can fracture the individual’s identity through the perspective of the wife, the protagonist and first-person narrator. By writing the novel from the wife’s vantage point, Offill delves into the intricacies of assuming a wifely identity. For Offill’s narrator, marriage compels her to let go of her former sense of self to build a life with her husband. While the narrator does love her husband—and they share a generally happy relationship for the first seven years of their marriage—the institution of marriage robs the narrator of her independent identity. The novel subtextually implies that this phenomenon is socioculturally expected of women—they are meant to let go of their true selves to thoroughly inhabit the wife identity instead. For this reason, when the narrator discovers that her husband is having an affair, she worries that she’ll no longer be a wife, and therefore become no one:

General notes: If the wife becomes unwived, what should she be called? Will the story have to be rewritten? There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it.