Summary
The setting is the “Johnny-the-Priest” saloon in New York City around 1910 in late fall. The stage is divided into the larger barroom and the smaller back room. Johnny, a man with a soft and bland face that hides a "cynical, callous, hard-as-nails” (6) personality, is lounging behind his bar and reading the paper.
Two longshoremen enter and order whiskey. Larry enters and says hello to Johnny, his boss. The longshoremen leave and the postman enters. He has a letter for Chris Christopherson in the care of Johnny. Johnny says Chris calls whenever he is in port, as he is the captain of a coal barge. The postman departs.
Larry asks where the letter is from and Johnny replies St. Paul, Minnesota. Larry remarks that Chris has a daughter out west.
As Johnny is about to depart, Chris enters. He is fifty, short and squat, red-faced, with a visage of twinkling good humor. His gait is rolling, his voice either a boom or a whisper, his clothes ill-fitting. He comes in happily, asking for a drink and singing a song about “My Yosephine.” Johnny asks where he’s come from and he replies Norfolk. It was a slow, foggy voyage and he is glad to be done with it.
The back door bell rings and Marthy comes in. She is middle-aged, with a “jowly, mottled face” and a “thick red nose” and “thick, gray hair piled anyhow in a greasy mop on top of her round head” (10). She has a mannish voice and laughs hoarsely but has a sense of humor. She comes in, grumbling, and sits down and asks for whiskey.
Larry tosses Chris the letter, which Chris says must be from his daughter Anna, whom he has not heard of for more than a year. He seems preoccupied and stares at the letter before opening it. Larry and Marthy watch him. He becomes excited and shouts that Anna is coming here right away; he has not seen her since she was five and she is now twenty. He somberly explains that as a sailor he was rarely home and his wife got tired of waiting in Sweden for him so she brought Anna to America and they settled in Minnesota with family. She died and Chris decided it was better to keep Anna with her cousins and live on the farm than be on the sea with him. When Larry jokes that Anna might marry a sailor anyway, Chris becomes momentarily irate and says she cannot do that.
Larry heads back to the bar and Chris follows him and says he has to get Marthy out of there before Anna comes, as the two of them have been sleeping together on the barge. Larry says Marthy doesn’t care and Chris can just keep Anna off the barge. Chris replies that he wants Anna to live on the barge with him. Larry is apprehensive.
Marthy calls out for more beer from the back and Chris reluctantly brings it in. Marthy notices he is acting oddly and laughs that she knows he wants to get rid of her and threatens that he shouldn’t start things he cannot finish. When his eyes widen, she guffaws that she is joking. She is wise to the game, would never make trouble for him, and thinks it is better if she leaves him. He thanks her and the two reassert their friendship. She finds it funny that she would be expected to commit suicide for a man.
Chris is drunk and ebullient now, singing and talking to Marthy about how he never wrote to Anna to come home because he was ashamed of himself but had always hoped that she would come to him. He thinks she will be pretty and strong, she can marry a man out here and have a home and children, and he will be the grandfather and all will be well.
Marthy listens, amused, and tells him to go sober up. He agrees and leaves. The bell rings again and Larry opens it. Anna enters. She is a tall, blonde, pretty, and Viking-esque woman but she is rundown in health and has “all the outward evidence of belonging to the world’s oldest profession” (17). Her clothes are tawdry and she tiredly sinks into a chair and asks for a drink. Larry serves her. She drinks quickly and then smiles at Marthy and says she needed that. She adds that she is waiting for someone here.
Marthy realizes this is Anna. Her staring is conspicuous enough that Anna takes offense to it, but then laughs at herself and says she knows she looks rotten because she was out of the hospital just two weeks ago. She invites Marthy to come sit with her and pulls out a cigarette.
Marthy keeps watching her intently, which Anna notices. Self-conscious and irritated, she asks if there is anything wrong with her. Marthy is irritated too and tells her she’s had her number the minute she came in here. Anna scoffs and replies that Marthy is her forty years later. Marthy angrily starts to say she never engaged in what Anna does, but pulls back and asks to be friends. Anna shakes her hand in agreement.
They talk for a few minutes. Anna explains the place she was in in St. Paul was raided and the girls got thirty days in jail. She hated being caged up and got sick enough that she had to go to the hospital. Marthy reminds her that she had said she was meeting someone here and Anna says it is her Old Man whom she has not seen since she was a kid. She says this is the only address she knows and she thinks he is a janitor but used to be a sailor. She hopes he can give her a place to eat and sleep, but she is not expecting much from him because all men kick women when they are down. In a sudden passion she bursts out that she hates all men.
After a minute she asks Marthy if she knows Chris Christopherson and when Marthy says yes, she excitedly asks her to tell her about him. Marthy says he is “as good a guy as ever walked on two feet” (21), which pleases Anna. Marthy continues that he is captain of a barge, not a janitor, which bothers Anna. She scoffs that she knew something would turn out wrong as it always does. She does not want to live on a dirty coal barge. Marthy bets she has no idea what a barge is like because her father kept her inland and away from “the old devil sea” (22).
Anna rolls her eyes and says that her father always said crazy things about the sea but it was out on the farm where she endured such misery and turned to prostitution. The family she stayed with treated her worse than a hired girl and the sons took advantage of her so she ran away to St. Paul became a nurse. That was miserable for her, she explained, as she had to take care of other people’s kids. She had a chance to get into a brothel so she took it. She asserts that she is not sorry about it either, and it’s all men’s fault—men at the farm, men at the hospital, men in the city. She hates every one of them.
Marthy shrugs and says Chris is a good one, just a simple old guy with silly notions about the sea who is nonetheless honest and kind. Before she can say more the door opens and she tells Anna he is here. She stands up and motions to Chris. She quietly tells him she is going to go pack up at the barge, and that Anna is in there and he should treat her right since she has been sick.
Chris is visibly nervous and gulps, moving into the room to get a glimpse of his daughter. He is awed by her clothing and her “high-toned appearance” (24). Both of them are nervous when they regard each other but soon Chris grabs her in a big hug. He says something in Swedish which makes her recoil a bit, but he still stares at her admiringly.
There are a few awkward moments. He says she is pretty so all men must fall in love with her, which she angrily protests because to her it sounds like what her clients say to her (she does not say this to him). She also asks why he never came to see her. Slowly he replies that he thought it was better she never saw him and that he never had the money to come to Sweden since he spent it unwisely. He sighs that that was the life of a sailor and the sea makes crazy fools of men.
Anna is scornful and asks if he really thinks the sea is to blame for everything, and if it is, why is he still working on it. She heard he was the captain of a coal barge and she thought he was a janitor. He lies and says he was a janitor for a while and only recently came back to sea. He also tries to explain that the barge is not a real boat, it is just a “piece of land with a house on it dat float. Yob on her ain’t sea yob. No. Ay don’t gat yob on sea, Anna, did Ay die first” (26).
She mentions being sick and he is concerned and asks if she feels better. She sighs and says she wants a long rest but now it does not seem like she will get it. He asks what she means and she says she thought he was a janitor and had a place for her to rest and stay. He says that he still has a place and would want her to stay with him and never have to be a nurse again. This makes her feel good and she asks if he is really glad to see her. He is effusive and says yes, and he says he is getting old and there is no one but her. She asks about his marrying again and he states he would never do so since he loved her mother so much. This impresses her and she asks what her mother was like. He promises to tell her everything but not here, as it is no place for a lady.
He tells her to come along with him to the barge, which is distasteful to her, but he promises her the fresh air is good out there. There will be good food and lots to look at, like moonlight and steamers passing. She becomes interested in his description and says she will come and look at it. Before they go Chris offers her a drink and she has to pretend she does not drink a lot. When he leaves, she bursts out to herself that this is awful and she better go. Then she sinks down and sobs.
Chris goes to Larry for the drinks and Larry asks who the blonde is. Thankfully Chris does not hear his tone and says it is his daughter. Larry is kind and maintains the facade that he does not know what Anna really is. Larry teases him that she is reforming him already because he only orders a small beer.
Chris brings the drinks to Anna, who is trying to cover up her crying. He sees that she looks tired and tells her to drink her wine to put the life back in her and then get a long rest. He says “Skoal” to toast and she does too. She downs her wine in one gulp like whiskey.
Analysis
Anna Christie is from famed American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s early career in which the drama is fairly simple, the emotions are intense, and the plot and themes are largely nationalistic. There is a seemingly happy ending to this classic “fallen woman” story, which unsurprisingly resonated with audiences. The play didn’t “deal primarily with ‘ideas’—at which O’Neill was no master—but with living people trapped by their circumstances” who are shown “desperately to wriggle out of a net of fate partly of their own making,” critic John Gassner observes. Arthur Holmberg says “When Anna Christie walks through the door at Johnny-the-Priest's, she looks, talks and acts as if she had just stepped from the pages of a Naturalist novel: hard-bitten, down-at-the-heels, alcoholic, desperate. She comes, of course, from the Naturalists' favorite social stratum: the bottom.” The play has “richly colloquial dialogue,” Eric Bentley says, and is a “‘slice of life’” according to Max J. Herzberg. Gassner also adds that “the possibility that the crudity of the play—that is, a certain incomplete fusion of emphases—makes Anna Christie all the more genuine by giving it a feeling of ‘life observed’ rather than of ‘play plotted.’”
It is clear, then, from these critical perspectives (and from any reading or viewing of it), that the play is relatively simple in terms of its characters, plot, and themes. Nevertheless, there are important contexts within which to explore it, as well as interpretations that go beyond the text to offer insights into why we might value such a play.
One of the most conspicuous elements of the play is its treatment of the classic “fallen woman” trope. In these films and stories and oft-circulated morality tales, a woman who whores herself out is sinful and “fallen” from God and society’s grace. Men victimize them and have power over them, but are the ones that redeem them (a classic film example is Pretty Woman). But critic Chris Westgate suggests that the way O’Neill introduces Anna and has her talk to Marthy first, who meets her “not with outrage…but instead with empathy for the damage to Anna’s psyche and her often uncontrollable and understandable anger toward men,” helps align the audience with the women and thus situates them to “appreciate the hypocrisy of Mat and Chris’s indignation when they discover Anna’s past.” We see the trauma Anna has endured, having been ignored by her father, left alone after her mother’s death with her cruel family, and taken advantage of by a cousin, thus propelling her into her profession.
This trauma manifests itself in the openness with which she talks to Marthy and also in the barely suppressed venom with which she says things to Chris and Mat that aren’t quite the truth but certainly hint at it. And Chris and Mat’s behavior towards Anna in the second and third acts show how they’re just as bad as Anna’s customers. They talk about her as if she is not there (a piece of “furniture,” she says, frustrated), frame their dispute as one that one of them will “win,” and devolve into paroxysms of rage and grief when they learn her fate as opposed to offering her any sympathy or, in Chris’s case, acknowledging his indirect complicity in her fate. Westgate writes that O’Neill indicts “male desire that twists women into commodities and simultaneously delays their individuality and autonomy.”
O’Neill offers critiques of traditional narratives of prostitution, gender, and alcoholism in the way he presents the saloon, Johnny-the-Priest’s, not as a tawdry, dangerous, dissolute place but instead one of real comfort, sustenance, and community. Chris Westgate notes that “O’Neill inverts the moralizing judgment of the middle class: as it was Anna’s family that started her wrong, it is the home that offers the threat to female respectability and that promotes the ‘social evil’ of prostitution, not the saloon…” The home was not a safe place for her, nor is the home a salutary or comforting place for sailors’ wives, who are lonely and anxious as they wait for their husbands to return.
Nevertheless, despite O’Neill’s willingness to offer blame to men for their role in corrupting and controlling women, as well as in their making homes less safe, there’s still a sense that Marthy, who really only has a few lines, is there to defend patriarchy, to be “someone to rescue it and Anna from anti-male sentiments,” Katie Johnson (quoting Ann Hall) notes. And Johnson continues by saying “Just as female anger can only take up a small amount of dramaturgical space, so too Marthy and Anna are given only a brief scene together.” O’Neill primarily situates Anna with men, caring more about how she interacts with them and playing out the struggle of whom she will ultimately spend her life with. Anna is independent, streetwise, and strong-willed, yes, but by the end of Act IV she has revealed herself a pawn in her father and lover’s game, a “bone of contention” and “object of exchange.” She has been judged, castigated, threatened; she is forced to declare herself and her love pure and take on the role of the “repentant courtesan.” While Anna’s “moments of female rage and independence are important ruptures in the American theatrical canon,” she “swallows her anger and self-determination to live with Mat (who has threatened to kill her) and Chris (who has abandoned her).” Johnson concludes by claiming that “While Anna's future is dubious at best, it's not punishment but rather penance that characterizes her journey and this atonement is not constituted by being left alone, but rather by being ensnared in the ‘inevitable—if overworked—comedic conclusion’ of marriage.”
