Family and Domestic Strife Theme Analysis

Much of the drama of The Perfect Storm doesn’t play out on the ocean but back home in the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Gloucester has a long history of fishermen who occupy a marginal role in the town, usually wandering in and out of bars because they don’t have the time or inclination to maintain a stable home. Fishermen “find places that are second homes because a lot of them don’t have real homes. […] ‘It’s a young man’s game, a single man’s game,’” as bartender and fisherman Bobby Shatford’s mother, Ethel, sums it up. Those who do have conventional homes and families sometimes watch them strain and break under the tension of long months at sea. And when the worst happens and a fisherman dies at sea, the remoteness of the death means that the entire town finds closure difficult to attain. By exploring fishing’s impact on those left at home, Junger argues that the fishing industry exacts a heavy societal toll by demanding that households and entire communities shoulder the fear and grief of a dangerous life at sea.

In the predominantly male world of fishing, the women left at home on the mainland face challenges of their own. Because their husbands are at sea for months at a time, fishermen’s wives’ lives are put on hold, and they often feel caught between their husbands’ love for them and the seemingly irresistible draw of the sea: “‘It was like I had one life and when he came back I had another,’ says Jodi Tyne, who divorced [captain] Billy [Tyne] over it. ‘[…] it was never gonna change, he was never gonna quit fishin’, though he said he wanted to. If he had to pick between me and the boat he picked the boat.” The rhythm of a fisherman’s life inevitably impacts the lives of those around him in ways that strain relationships.

When fishermen are gone, their wives, partners, or other family members are almost completely cut off from them. Fisherman’s wife Kimberly Barrie describes what happens after she’s interviewed on the news: “suddenly every fisherman’s wife on the East coast is calling [her] to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. ‘As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them,’ she says. ‘The fishermen’s wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic.’” In the early 1990s, people are dependent on communication by telephone and the limits of television news, meaning that wives bear the ongoing strain of never knowing for sure if their husbands are okay.

Because deaths occur hundreds of miles from home, often under uncertain circumstances, it means that after a disaster occurs, it’s all the more difficult for survivors to move on. Historically, the families of fishermen couldn’t know if their loved ones had blown adrift somewhere and might wander back months or years later: “Missing dory crews could turn up at any time, and so there was never a point at which the families knew for sure they could grieve and get on with their lives. ‘We saw a father go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the ocean,’ recorded the Provincetown Advocate after a terrible gale in 1841. ‘And there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the distant horizon . . . for some speck on which to build a hope.’” Emotionally crushing in a day of even more limited technology, this unknowing has a modern analogue, too.

Even a modern catastrophe, like the disappearance of the Andrea Gail, requires people to believe, without evidence, that their loved ones are really dead. “If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never return […] The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.” In a way, the deaths of fishermen at sea make heavier demands on mourners than other kinds of deaths do.

As Junger summarizes, “Like a war or a great fire, the effects of a storm go rippling outward through webs of people for years, even generations. It breaches lives like coastlines and nothing is ever again the same.” Gloucester is just one example of a community that’s had to endure such damage not once, but over centuries. Without romanticizing their toughness or ignoring the dysfunctions that the town deals with, Junger implies that this damage inevitably shapes a community’s psyche in far-reaching ways.