Summary
The setting is the same, two days later on a foggy night. Anna is sitting in a rocking chair, her suitcase near her. She looks pale and worn. A knock sounds and Chris enters. He is bedraggled and drunk. She shakes her head scornfully at him. He asks if she means to go and she says she went to get a train ticket but has decided to go tomorrow instead. Chris tells her she does not have to worry about her past life anymore. She asks what he means but he seems not to hear her. She says she wishes Mat would come back even if it were to kill or beat her. Chris softly says it seems like she really loved him. This is a surprise to her, and he admits that he thinks everything bad that happened to her was his own fault. He apologizes for it all and says he hopes she will forgive him someday. She dully asks why not today? He kisses her hand. She is touched, and replies that “We’re all poor nuts, and things happen, and we yust get mixed in wrong, that’s all” (72).
He blames the sea again and she laughs. He falls silent. She returns to what he said earlier and he tells her haltingly that he is going to ship away again. He signed on as a bo’sun on a steamer and the money he gets will be sent to her every month. He will make up for the wrongs of the past and knows he can never best the sea. Anna is bitter and tells him he is just doing what he did in the past. But then she resigns herself and says they can talk later.
Chris asks her if she is going to look for Mat. She says no. He drunkenly drops his coat and something hard bumps against the ground. Anna is shocked to see it is a revolver and calls him crazy for thinking he could hurt Mat and fix anything. He sighs and says he knows and never even bought bullets.
Chris plans to go lie down and Anna asks where he is shipping to. He says Cape Town. He asks again if she forgives him and she wearily responds that of course she does; he is just who he is, as is she. He cries and kisses her and leaves.
Alone, Anna despondently looks at a magazine and then gets up and paces the cabin. She hears Mat’s footsteps and is lit up with glee. He appears, dirty, bloodshot, and bloated, with an expression of “wild mental turmoil, impotent animal rage baffled by its own abject misery” (76). He does not see her at first and sinks into a chair. He berates himself for thinking she’d be here. When his eyes light upon her bag he is happy she is not gone yet, but once he realizes she must be ashore he assumes she is back in the trade. He says he will choke the life out of her.
Anna makes herself visible, and Mat starts in fear. She asks what he wants and he says airily that he wants a last word. She raises the revolver and tells him not to get close to her. He is contemptuous but then, stricken with grief, tells her just to do it; his life has been miserable these two days. She is overcome with grief as well and drops the gun. She asks why he came. Mat responds that he is a weak fool and drank oceans of alcohol but could not forget her or what she told him. She sees he has been fighting too and he calls himself a “yellow coward for all men to spit at” (78). He knows he is raving like a lunatic and begs her to tell him it is not true. Surely it must be a lie, he implores her to tell him.
She sighs that it is not a lie but she is not like that anymore. She admits she was going to leave today but she thought of him and could not do it. She was waiting for him and she has changed. He proclaims wildly he could never forget to his dying day what she told him.
Anna sadly tells him he can go now and is planning on going into New York tomorrow. He asks if she will do the same again. She replies yes. He cannot believe the anguish he feels. Her voice breaks and she tells him to stop kicking her, as she is already licked.
Mat tells her he has signed up to take a ship sailing out tomorrow. When he says it is to Cape Town, Anna starts laughing uproariously to Mat’s confusion. She tells him he’ll have a new girl in every port. He retorts that she loved all the men she was with. This astonishes her and she acts as if it is a monstrous insult. She says she hated them all so much.
He is pleased with her vehemence and wonders aloud what would happen if he started believing her now. She says to stop toying with her, that there is no use. He struggles to get out his next thought but ends up saying “If I was believing—that you’d never had love for any other man in the world but me—I could be forgetting the rest, maybe” (82). Anna cries out in joy. He continues that he would have a right to believe that she changed and he did the changing, and that wouldn’t be her life anymore. She hangs on his words. He says, “For I’ve a power of strength in me to lead men the way I want, and women too, maybe, and I’m thinking I’d change you to a new woman entirely, so I’d bever know, or you either, what kind of woman you’d been in the past at all” (82). And he’d know it was her father’s fault, not hers. And if she took an oath he would know for sure.
He pulls out a crucifix and she sincerely swears he is the only man she’s ever felt love for, that she’s forgotten all her bad behavior, that God will strike her dead if she is lying. They embrace but he has a misgiving because she is not Catholic. That is short-lived, though, and he bursts out that he does not care. He says they’ll be married in the morning with the help of God and that they will be happy now.
Chris appears. His first look is knee-jerk hatred, but then he relaxes into resignation and relief. Anna smiles happily and tells them they will be shipmates. They are astounded. Anna quickly tells Mat she is not mad at her father going away again, as the sea is where he belongs and she wants him to go. She will be fine being alone and she and Mat will get a little house and start a family.
After Anna leaves the room, Mat is gloomy because he asks Chris what religion they are and learns it is Lutheran. But he’s quickly resigned and says it is the will of God. Anna returns. Chris is occupied with the odd coincidence of them both shipping out on the same ship and thinks it must be the sea doing her dirty tricks. Mat cannot help but superstitiously agree this time. Anna forces a laugh. She says they will toast to the sea, which they do. Chris is uneasy, though, and looks out into the foggy night. He says “fog, fog, fog, all bloody time. You can’t see vhere you vas going, no. only dat ole davil, sea—she knows!” (87). The other two look at him.
Analysis
Even a cursory overview of the history of Anna Christie yields two indisputable facts: 1) the play was very popular and audiences/critics thought the ending was a happy one, and 2) O’Neill completely disagreed, did not think the ending was happy, and was quite annoyed with the misinterpretation. Where does this discrepancy come from? What do critics say about the ending?
The ending might seem happy, yes. Mat decides to forgive Anna for her transgressions and decides to marry her. Her father is also able to chalk up their issues to the sea and thus get over them. Anna is no longer a “fallen woman” and can marry the man whom she loves; she’s repented and she’s reformed. Mat and Chris are getting along to the best of their abilities and will ship out together and make money for their family. It could have been much worse, and at certain parts in acts III and IV, it certainly seemed as if it were trending that way.
O’Neill could not believe this interpretation. He wrote to a friend that “the happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten.” Critic John Gassner writes that O’Neill “feared he had not pointed up sufficiently the tentativeness of the happy reunion, in spite of Anna’s father’s foreboding last speech, the Irish sailor’s doubts about the non-Catholic Anna’s faith, and the implication that although the characters ‘have had their moment, the decision still rests with the sea…’”
Indeed, it’s hard to ignore these facts: Chris is leaving his daughter again to go to sea, repeating patterns that caused their family so much trauma in the past. Mat is also leaving, with a promise of fidelity to Anna that seems doubtful based on his history. Anna is to stay home alone for much of the time, away from the sea that cleansed her and subjected to loneliness and lingering shame and regret. She’s had to swear on a crucifix and she isn’t even Catholic, so her pledge seems suspect. O’Neill’s stage directions say that Chris “speaks with somber premonition” (86) to the couple as he tells them, “It’s funny. It’s queer, yes—you and m shipping on the same boat dat vay. It ain’t right. Ay don’t know—it’s dat funny vay ole davil sea do her vorst dirty tricks, yes. It’s so” (86). Even Mat is struck by this, and O’Neill has him “nodding his head in gloomy acquiescence—with a great sigh” (86) as he says, “I’m fearing maybe you have the right of it for once, divil take you” (86). Anna feels the mood shift and has to force her laugh and admonish the men to “Cut out the gloom. We’re all fixed now, ain’t we, me and you?” (87). There’s more than enough textual evidence to cast doubt on the happy ending.
Contemporary critics tend to agree with the assessment that the play’s ending is unhappy, or at the very least ambiguous. J. Chris Westgate says, unambiguously, “O'Neill does everything he can in the play to cultivate audience skepticism toward Anna's enthusiasm in the final act. Mat's many brawls prior to his return to the barge suggests the potential for domestic abuse; Mat will live the same life that metaphorically widowed Anna's mother; and the ‘little house’ that Anna envisions as home for Mat, Chris, and herself is made ironic by Anna's ‘yes, that kind of house.’” He adds, “The married life that awaits Anna is anything but happy or even hopeful considering what the play has established about the way men exploit and abandon women.”
Zander Brietzke first notes that “Anna's quick transformation from a hardened girl of the streets to a young maiden in the eyes of Burke defies credibility. The problem with the ending of ‘Anna Christie’ ultimately has less to do with a happy ending than with the dramatic time necessary to produce it.” He then offers a nuanced critique: “Even as characters propose a new union, they reenact old patterns. In light of the great plays that had a similar ending two decades later, it is now possible to look back on that earlier play and see two characters fighting for what they want and what represents their ‘happiness’ and admire their struggle for each other even as they repeat the sins of their fathers and fall prey to a destiny that they cannot foresee and certainly have no will to prevent.”
Sheila Hickey Garvey casts doubt on Mat’s ability to be a loving, patient, forgiving husband by focusing on his power in deciding whether or not Anna is really cleansed and forgiven and worthy. She writes that “it can be seen that O'Neill was conjuring in the character of Burke the mythic image of a Shaman, one who has god-like powers. Burke, then, holds the power of a priest over Anna for if he forgives her past she will be able to enter ‘respectable society.’ Without Burke's absolution, Anna is doomed to a life which she herself no longer wants. Since Anna is at Burke's ‘mercy,’ a spiritual bond exists between the two, a binding contract and one which woman must submit to if she is to have a respected place in a patriarchal culture.”
