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passivity. The men are inept, nervous, inarticulate, and childishly willful;
the women are strong, dignified, wise, and forgiving. The women are to
serve the men, care for them, and comfort them. (The captain's wife,
who stands in the way of his marriage to the banker's daughter, is the
one "bad" woman, and her badness consists essentially in being less
instead of more mature than her husband; she is a problem and she
should be a mother.) For each of the main characters, there is a scene
in which the woman he loves undresses him (partly or completely, de–
pending on whether the couple is married or not) and puts him to bed.
And when it is the sailor who is put to bed, the dream becomes almost
explicit. He is the man (the real man) who has lost his hands-and
with them his power to be sexually aggressive (this fact is lightly em–
phasized a number of times). Every night, his wife will have to put him
to bed, and then it will be her hands that must be used in making love.
Beneath the pathos of the scene (certainly the most dramatic scene of
the movie), one feels a current of excitement, in which the sailor's mis–
fortune becomes a kind of wish-fulfillment, as one might actually dream
it: he
must
be
passive; therefore he can be passive without guilt.
RoBERT
W
ARSHOW
