Ibsenās The Lady from the Sea is about the human sense of freedom. Ellida fell in love with a sailor on a brief port call when she was young. They became āengagedā and symbolically married by throwing their rings into the sea, and he said he would come back for her and leaves. As time goes by she becomes obsessed with the sea, feeling as if she is married to the sea, and part of the sea.
This is the 19thĀ century and women are dependent on men for their sustenance, and there are still widely shared feelings about the inviolateness of marriage vows. Ellida marries a widower, a kindly doctor, with two daughters, and bears a son, who dies very young (age 3). Ellida is distraught at his loss. She is close to the older daughter, Bolette, but the younger daughter, Hilde, rejects her, and is childishly rude to her, because she feels Ellida is rejecting her.Ā
The older daughterās aging former-tutor comes to visit; he is in love with his former pupil. She, on the other hand, is just yearning to learn, about life, and the world.
There is also a young man, in frail health, not expected to live long. He is yearning to become an artist, and naively contemplating courting the older daughter. But he is also contemplating (perhaps unrealistically) going away to become an artist.
The sailor returns, as promised. Ellida had told the doctor, when he was courting her, that there had been someone in her past. He had accepted it and not pursued it further. She now tells him the full story about the āengagementā and āmarriageā, and the sailorās vow to return, and her vow to wait for him. But in the meantime it had been discovered that he had killed the captain (for an unknown reason) and fled, and Ellida had thought he was gone forever, or had perished. That was what was underlying her passion for the sea; she also felt that her son had eyes like him, and the sea.
So Ellida is yearning for her lover, and for the sea that embodies him and her yearning. She ceased physical relations with her husband at the death of her son, because she felt his death was a punishment for breaking her vows to the sailor in marrying the doctor for survival, vows which she feels she has kept in her heart, and has never stopped yearning for the sailor, and their sea.
The sailor, who has never stopped yearning for Ellida, has returned, hoping she would fulfill her vow. The young, frail man is yearning to go off into the world and become an artist, and then return to marry. The aging tutor is yearning for the older daughter, his pupil, to return his love and marry him. The older daughter is yearning to go into the world to learn, but does not have the material means, The younger daughter is just toying with the frail young man; she is still yearning for maternal love, from Ellida, having lost her own mother.
Ellida needs freedom to discover her own decision, otherwise she is bound by the love of the sailor, her vow to him (and herself) and her vows to her husband (who is good, and loves her selflessly, despite her past, their lost child, and her physical withdrawal from him). He struggles internally (he had naively thought that the man in her past had been the aging tutor), and then, according to his nature, he grants Ellida her moral freedom, and this enables her, in the last moment, to break her vow to the sailor.
In a microcosm, the same happens with the older daughter and the aging tutor: He proposes to her, she declines, because she does not love him; he says he accepts to show her the world nevertheless, with only the hope that she might one day learn to love him. She senses that he really means this, and accepts it, without vows.
The frail young artist, who had seemed to be courting the older daughter, cheerfully declares to the younger daughter that once he has become an artist, he may return and court her instead, because she is closer to his age.
Everyone sees that the doctor, who had been ready to leave his beloved lifelong home and region with Ellida in the hope that it might cure her of her obsession with the sea (and the sailor), is close to Ellida again, and she to him. She finally shows love to the petulant younger daughter, who needed it most, and immediately reciprocates.