Summary
The scene is set on the Simeon Winthrop, Chris’s barge, ten days later. It is anchored in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is ten at night and fog surrounds the barge.
Anna is standing near a coil of rope with a lantern. She looks transformed—healthy, full of vigor. Chris comes out of the cabin calling for her to come inside. She is quiet, reverently looking out at the fog. She tells her father she loves it and she feels as if she were out of things altogether. She almost loves the sea, she confesses.
Chris scoffs and says this is foolish talk. But at her angry look he backs down and says he is glad she feels good again. He asks if she likes being with him. She replies yes, that her life is different from anything it has ever been before. She never thought living on ships was so different from living on land. If she were a man she would have been a sailor. Chris replies vehemently that he is not a sailor, this is not the sea, and this is not what it is really like. She ignores him and breathes deeply, claiming she feels clean as if she’d taken a bath.
When he says she is acting funny, she becomes annoyed and asks why he is trying to ruin this for her. She asks him to sit so they can talk about something else. He complies. Talk turns to the farm. She tells him passionately that she hated it and he would hate it too. He belongs on the water, sailing around the world. After a moment she asks if the men in her family always sailed.
Chris says they did and they were all fools. All the men in their Swedish village went to the sea. His father was buried at sea. His brothers went to sea and two of them died. Only one died in his bed. He plans to die in bed as well.
He does say that he was a bo’sun, which was a kind of officer. She asks what they do, full of admiration, but he returns to his theme of benign disgust. He says all the men in his family were fools and cared about nothing except money, drinking, and women. They never came home, never did anything valuable, and the sea swallowed them all up. Anna laughs and jokes that they’re good sports, but then asks if the women in the family married sailors. Chris says yes but it was always bad for them.
They are quiet. Anna says she feels old tonight, like she’d come home after a long time away. She feels like she has found something she was missing and has forgotten everything else. She is happy for once.
Chris says nothing for a moment, then says regretfully that he should not have brought her. His tone surprises her and she remarks that it seems like he thinks something is going to happen. He rants about the sea again.
Analysis
Anna finds herself happy at sea. She “looks healthy, transformed, the natural color has come back into her face” (30). She says she loves the fog and that she is “getting so’s I love [the sea]” (31). This is because “It makes me feel clean—out here—’s if I’d taken a bath” (31), but also because she feels like she’s tapped into something deep in her soul, in her family lineage— “I do feel sort of—nutty, to-night. I feel old…like I’d been living a long, long time—out here in the fog…It all seems like I’d been here before lots of times” (34).
Critic Zander Brietzke explains that out here in the water, away from that land “that defiled her,” Anna has a spiritual transformation: “The enveloping fog invigorates her and washes her clean again. The water offers freedom and redemption and an opportunity to start life over.” Brietzke connects the “near religious experience” to her meeting of Mat, whom she fishes out of the sea.
Chris does not share his daughter’s (or Mat’s, who is about to show up in the play) view of the sea. In fact, he evinces a great hatred of it, a deeply-held conviction that the sea is duplicitous and evil. The sea, personified as a woman, “make[s] dem crazy fools with her dirty tricks” (26). The men of his family have all been destroyed by the sea: “Dey’re all fool fallar, dem fallar in our family. Dey all vork rotten yob on sea for nutting, don’t care nutting but yust gat big pay day in pocket, gat drunk, gat robbed, ship avay again on oder voyage. Dey don’t come home, Dey don’t do anytang like good man do. And dat ole davil, sea, sooner, later she svallow dem up” (33). And the women have it bad as well: “Dey don’t see deir men only once in a long while. Dey set and vait all ‘lone. And vhen deir boys grows up, go to sea, dey sit and vait some more” (34).
He blames the sea for Mat showing up and trying to take away Anna when he’s just gotten her back, and blames it again when he learns the truth about Anna’s past (conveniently forgetting he is the one whose decisions led her to do this, and that the real trauma happened on land, not at sea)— “Ain’t your fault, Anna, Ay know dat…It’s dat ole davil, sea, that do this to me!...It’s her dirty tricks! (69). Even when Anna forgives him for his disappointment and his abandonment of her as a child, he takes no responsibility for anything and just says it’s nobody’s fault except “dat ole davil, sea!” (72).
Anna is skeptical of Chris’s views. (Mat also sees that Chris is delusional, sneering that he is “blaming the sea for your troubles ye are again, God help you” [53] when Chris claims Anna needs to stay away from the sea.) She asks him when she first hears of his antipathy if he thinks “the sea’s to blame for everything" (26). She responds bitterly when he suggests that she would be happy in a little house on the land “Little home in the country! I wish you could have seen the little home in the country where you had me in jail till I was sixteen!” (49). She is exasperated and resigned when she sees that while Chris might “forgive” her for her transgressions, he sees no fault of his own and instead stubbornly claims that this external, fateful source of the sea has it out for him and directly caused the misery.
