Character Descriptions
O’Neill’s descriptions of his characters are not only physical but also attest to the lives they’ve lived and their interior states. In regards to Anna, for example, he writes that “She is a tall, blond, fully-developed girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion but now run down in health and plainly showing all the outward evidences of belonging to the world’s oldest profession” (17). We can picture a beautiful woman who is nonetheless run down by her lifestyle and has the weariness behind the eyes to prove it.
Women Waiting
Chris talks about why it is not a good thing for women to marry sailors, speaking of “Lonely women waiting for their men” (34). This is a simple image but a powerful one because it shows the difficulty for women who marry men who go to sea, as they are alone and never know if their husbands will return to them. Ironically, Chris does not die at sea, leaving a widow at home, but he is just as problematic because he never returns since it’s too emotionally difficult for him.
Anna and Her Men
There is a powerful image in the later part of the play in which “Anna stands looking from one to the other of them as if she thought they had both gone crazy” (63). Her positioning between the two of them shows that she is not a person so much as an object to them—an object to control, to judge, to use. Both men have ideas about how she should comport herself and she finds herself frustrated and exhausted.
Fog
The fog is a pervasive image throughout the text. It hides, shrouds, obfuscates—but Anna finds that cleansing, a relief that her past is “hidden” by the fog.
