50 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth StroutLucy by the Sea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Loneliness of Being Human
Being human is a solitary experience. In spite of being social animals, people are essentially alone, isolated by individual perspectives and experiences. Strout probes this idea in many of her novels. In Lucy by the Sea, she explores this through the literal isolation many experienced during the Covid pandemic. Lucy Barton grapples with isolation throughout the novel, using metaphor to try to understand it.
Lockdown is a metaphor for human loneliness, as well as something that actually took place. During the Covid pandemic, many areas, including New York, went into lockdown. Beyond essential services, all New Yorkers were ordered to stay indoors. Lucy realizes that the lockdown is a more tangible representation of humanity’s true, constant state of separateness. This revelation comes one evening as she and William are driving home. Lucy felt:
[T]hat old, old desolation, because these were houses where people lived and did normal things, this is how I had seen it as a child and it is how I saw it now, and I said to William, ‘My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere’ (173).
At the end of the novel, Lucy broadens this understanding: “We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all” (287). Lockdown helps Lucy illustrate a truth she already recognizes, that “we are all alone in these things we suffer” (195). Lucy realizes that lockdown is just another form of isolation, a universal human state.
Lucy uses to explore isolation through ping-pong balls. She remembers a movie she saw when she was young, with ping-pong balls bouncing off each other. Even though she was just a child, she thought: “That is like people” (186). She notes that, like ping-pong balls, “we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little” (186). Frequent encounters followed by instant separation seems, to her, an apt metaphor for the human condition. When William is suffering, Lucy feels her inability to alleviate his pain: “And it seemed that my ping-pong ball could not touch his right now” (195). She sees, again, that connection is brief; humans are essentially alone in their struggles with grief and shame, no matter how they might try to connect.
As a protagonist, Lucy is thoughtful and compassionate. She seeks to understand the perspectives of others, and wants to be close to those she loves. Yet she understands the essential aloneness of being human. She admits she is no different when her brother dies and she thinks: “I was very grateful to have William, but grief is a solitary matter” (232).
Class Divides in America
Strout explores issues of class in the United States through Lucy’s perspective. Lucy has all the privilege of an affluent, educated urban white woman; her childhood, however, was marked by extreme poverty and abuse. This gives her a unique perspective on the social issues roiling the United States during the period in the novel.
When Lucy was a child in the rural town of Amgash, Illinois, her family lived in a garage, and her mother took in sewing to earn money. Lucy remembers how “many nights for supper we had molasses on a piece of white bread” (41). Although Lucy has come a long way from her childhood, her siblings have not—her brother still lives in their childhood home, and her sister lives nearby. Lucy’s siblings force her to confront uncomfortable perspectives. Her relationship with her sister, Vicky, has always been troubled, and Vicky sees Lucy as a snob. Lucy is confused by her sister’s hostility until William points out: “They’re angry. Their lives have been hard. […] She’s working a dangerous job right now, because she has to. But she still can’t get ahead” (164). Vicky and William’s insight into her behavior offers a different perspective on the hostility that the rural working-class population may feel towards the more affluent, urban population.
Strout again invites a broader understanding of the issue when Lucy meets a new friend, Charlene, while volunteering at the food pantry. While chatting, Lucy discovers that Charlene cleans houses for a living and thinks, afterward, that she liked her. She is shocked when, upon leaving, she sees a Trump bumper sticker on Charlene’s car. When she tells William about it, he too is surprised, but then quickly dismayed by his own reaction: “Lucy, people are in trouble. And those who aren’t in trouble, they just don’t get it. Look how I just didn’t get it—being surprised that this Charlene woman was working in a food pantry. And also, we make the people who are in trouble feel stupid. It’s not good” (164). Strout uses this exchange to explore Lucy and William’s prejudices against people like Charlene, working-class Trump supporters, to challenge their assumptions and highlight the dangers of such an attitude.
Strout also peppers Lucy and William’s stay in Maine with small confrontations. These illustrate the resentment that the rural residents of Crosby feel toward affluent outsiders, especially those who came during the pandemic. Soon after arriving in Maine, Lucy and William find a sign on their car reading “GET OUT OF HERE NEW YORKERS! GO HOME!! (45). Lucy finds out the man who left it is the same neighbor that she has been trading greetings with on her walk. After a woman screams at Lucy in the grocery store parking lot, she and William trade their New York license plates for local Maine plates to blend in. Strout uses these and other small incidents to show the depth of the divide between locals and New Yorkers, who seem to them to represent the other side of the divide. This division is complicated, Strout notes, by the pandemic, and the fact that outsiders are seen as more of a threat than ever.
Strout depicts the issue of class, and the way that it manifested during the tumultuous first year of the pandemic. In doing so, she represents not just Lucy’s privileged perspective, but the perspectives of those on the other side of the divide, humanizing them.
The Changing Role of Motherhood
Lucy by the Sea takes place during a cataclysmic time in the United States. The Covid pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the January 6 insurrection of the United States Capitol all feature prominently in the novel. Strout shows that, in spite of devastating events, everyday life continues to move forward with all its messiness and complications, including interpersonal relationship.
Before the pandemic erupts in New York, Lucy and her daughters live in the city and have a close relationship. However, Strout makes it clear that this doesn’t mean their relationship is perfect. Lucy is a worrier, and as a result, her daughters sometimes keep things from her, or go to William instead. When Lucy discovers this and asks William why, he tells her that “they just worry about how much you worry” (145). This leads to a distance that becomes more apparent when Lucy and her daughters are separated during the pandemic. Although they remain close, their relationship shifts over the course of the novel to one between adult women, rather than mother and children. The change is a big adjustment for Lucy.
At first, Lucy is still her daughters’ main support system in times of stress and tension, and the dynamic is still that of a mother and children. While Becka is facing the end of her marriage and the difficulty of being trapped in her apartment with Trey, she is on the phone with Lucy multiple times a day, “screaming, crying, ‘Mom! Mom! Oh, Mommy!’” (61) Becka’s reliance on Lucy is clear, as is the fact that their relationship is still that of mother and child, as Becka illuminates when she reverts to calling Lucy “Mommy.”
Yet over time, and especially after she relocates to Connecticut, Becka withdraws from needing Lucy’s constant support. She makes life-changing decisions, dissolving her marriage, moving out of New York, and changing careers. When Lucy worries about the new distance between her and Becka, Chrissy tells her, “she doesn’t need you like she used to. […] Mom, you did your job. She’s on her way” (130). Strout makes it clear that this new phase of their relationship, while upsetting for Lucy, is actually a good thing.
Chrissy suffers during the pandemic as well—she has two miscarriages and contracts Covid in the emergency room. But she hasn’t depended as heavily on Lucy as Becka has. It isn’t until the end of the novel, when Chrissy confesses to Lucy that she is considering an affair, that she comes to her mother for advice. Lucy responds with a frank assessment of her own brief affair during her marriage to William and the reasons behind it. She is able to put her worry as a mother aside, and offers the insight and understanding that Chrissy needs, signifying the beginning of a new phase of their relationship.
At the end of the novel, Lucy and her daughters connect in a new way, as adult women. Strout illustrates this by showing how her daughters care for Lucy now as well. They are concerned about her new relationship with William. Becka, in particular, worries that William is using her, and reflects that she’s “just not sure Dad’s always trustworthy” (282). Her insight makes Lucy wonder about her decision, illustrating how their relationship is now more of a two-way street, with adult women showing concern for each other.
Lucy is still close with her daughters. Even in this new, more adult phase of their relationship, that intimacy doesn’t change. Lucy reflects: “I thought how different they—and their lives—had become from what I had expected. And I thought: It is their life, they can do what they want, or need to do” (284). At the end of the novel, Lucy remembers being pregnant with her daughter Chrissy: “I had looked down at my big stomach and put my hand over it and thought: Whoever you are, you do not belong to me. My job is to help you get into the world, but you do not belong to me” (284).
This is a lesson that Lucy has had to relearn over the course of the novel. It also comes with the realization that her relationship with her daughters is now deeper than ever, on completely different terms.
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