Susan Glaspell in Context

The impact of Susan Glaspell (1876–1948), the acknowledged “mother of American modern theatre,” is fully represented in this collection of thirty-one masterful articles (227). Expertly edited by J. Ellen Gainor, the volume covers Glaspell’s development as an artist while giving readers just enough biographical information to follow her reemergence as a major American writer with international reach. Altogether, this book is a gold mine of approaches and sources for students, scholars, teachers, and artists.The collection also includes a table of Glaspell’s translation history by Emeline Jouve; reporting by scholars on six newly recovered short stories; and a concluding “curated conversation” with six directors of performances instrumental in reviving Glaspell’s plays and reputation. Along the way we have articles on topics ranging from Trifles’s impact on present-day jury selection to Glaspell’s love affair with science (it ended badly). Aoise Stratford’s article on teaching Trifles includes tips on using Glaspell’s play to teach students to write an academic paper.In the opening chapter, biographer Barbara Ozieblo points out that, despite rebelling against the time’s societal restrictions of women’s lives, Glaspell frequently deferred to her husband and male lovers. She “seemingly built them up by frequently ignoring her own good for the sake of the men she loved. Such ambivalence marked all aspects of Glaspell’s life, making it difficult to classify her definitely as a feminist, socialist, modernist—although she was all of these” (3). These ambivalences, along with what Drew Eisenhauer terms the “central ambiguity” in Glaspell’s The Road to the Temple, a modernist biography of her husband George Cram (Jig) Cook, introduce some riddles that bear further exploration by scholars. This book reiterates those puzzles, even while providing full-blown context for Glaspell studies thus far.Throughout, the volume adds background information on Glaspell’s career as a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and thinker. All in all, the volume is a multidisciplinary masterpiece as it crescendos with a full range of approaches to understanding the complicated life and work of an artist whose texts often present, initially, as fairly simple tales. Scholars and students will be inspired to pursue any number of avenues when pondering her life and work.As the biographer of playwright/novelist/anarcha-feminist Neith Boyce (1872–1951), I was delighted to see evidence of her close friendship with Glaspell. Boyce and Glaspell were contemporaries in Provincetown, shared midwestern backgrounds, and had similar early careers following the pattern outlined in Jerry Dickey’s “Women in American Journalism” chapter. Like Glaspell, Boyce did early newspaper work and wrote short fiction and novels followed by plays. Both had difficult husbands who were great talkers fascinated by philosophy. In Glaspell’s case, her husband died in 1924, thus freeing her to dedicate her remaining life to writing. Boyce’s husband, Hutchins Hapgood, persisted until 1944—always pestering her to devote more time to him and the children. Like Glaspell, Boyce wrote for the second tier of readership, the general educated reader. Similar to Glaspell’s six “new” short stories discussed in a separate chapter, Boyce’s short stories for newspaper supplement sections keep turning up, thanks to the ongoing digitization of old newspapers.On the subject of other friendships, Jeffery Kennedy’s “Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill” chapter shows that O’Neill and Glaspell were equals as writing comrades and friends for about six years—a rarity for O’Neill. The relationship essentially died in 1922 after O’Neill ripped the Provincetown Players’ production of The Hairy Ape from Cook and gave it to James Light. Always the dutiful wife, Glaspell stuck by her husband so the friendship with O’Neill was never fully revived.Marcia Noe explains the push-pull paradox of midwestern culture in a chapter devoted to Glaspell’s roots, which began in Davenport, Iowa. The Midwest can be a place of egalitarianism as well as proto-fascism; a place of safety and/or danger; a space of isolation or warm community—and all at the same time. Noe ties Glaspell’s idealism and critique of nativist Americanist jingoism to this aspect of her experience. And I was delighted to get a fuller story of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, in which Glaspell, Floyd Dell, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Jig Cook were instrumental. In too many surveys, the Chicago movement is portrayed as merely something that led to something better in New York. Chicago’s renaissance, along with the Little Theater Movement discussed in a chapter by Dorothy Chansky, reinforced the “multiplicity of the Midwest” (20), in Noe’s words. Chansky puts the Provincetown Players into an international context, even as it “retooled the way Americans thought about the theatre” (108). The work in little theaters across the nation involved thousands of women, particularly because many of them were sponsored by women’s clubs and groups. Some theaters even critiqued Progressive Era politics. The movement was complicated, like the Midwest.Now known mainly for her plays, Glaspell really considered herself more of a fiction writer than playwright, according to Martha Carpentier’s chapter on the modernist novel. Carpentier reviews Glaspell’s nine novels, now out of print, over four decades, thereby also revealing how Glaspell’s work fell into disrepute in the mid-twentieth century. Up until World War II, Glaspell’s work was critically acclaimed and well known internationally. Citing Paul Lauter and others, Carpentier details the gender bias that excised Glaspell from the twentieth-century canon. Coming out of World War II, there was a general agreement that the United States needed to create an American canon of masculinist values discrete from the British novel of manners (Jane Austen et al.). This was amplified by the rising professionalization of the academy. Generic categorization and periodization were “deemed essential to the professionalization of literary academia” (128), writes Carpentier. In fact, Glaspell was further penalized for her remarkable ability to move from genre to genre in her long career. She was downgraded to being a regionalist, perhaps even a sentimentalist.Second-wave feminism to the rescue! Mary E. Papke outlines the reinstantiation of Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers” as resulting from feminist scholarly work in archives and the rereading of “lost” texts, beginning in the 1970s. This was the start of a revival that culminated in the founding of the International Susan Glaspell Society in 2003. Critical to the revival’s global reach was the work of Linda Ben-Zvi, J. Ellen Gainor, and Marcia Noe, among others who authored articles in this volume. French feminist theories were also instrumental to Glaspell’s reassessment, along with queer theory.Chapters by Sharon Friedman and Selena Couture ponder the darker paradoxes in Glaspell’s 1921 play, Inheritors. Friedman unpacks Glaspell’s belief in a “democratic nationalism that critiques conservative concepts of citizenship, nationhood, and ‘belonging’” (135). This was Glaspell’s response to American nativism (“antipathy for an internal minority seen as ‘alien’” [135]) and the eugenics movement (belief in selective breeding) in the fraught moments leading up to World War I—when immigrants, Native Americans, radicals, and any kind of “alien” were harassed and even killed. The play, according to Friedman, illustrates Glaspell’s ambivalence about “the means of achieving a unified nation” (140) via a bloody Civil War. Further, Glaspell’s integration of the Black Hawk War (Blackhawk Purchase) into the tale of Silas Morton’s dream of a college on the prairies at least mentions the presence of prior residents of the land. Selena Couture’s reading of act 1 through the lens of critical Indigenous studies sees it “as revealing an ‘unresolved white settler hunger’ to possess the land” (140). She, James H. Cox, and Alexander Pettit all credit Glaspell with at least acknowledging “questions of indigeneity and representation” (140). Couture considers Glaspell an “ideal artist with whom to engage because . . . she was even critical at times of [the] settler colonial project and very aware of the precarity of it” (392, as cited on 145).After chapters on Glaspell’s feminism, attitudes on sex, science, law, education, and her international influence, Jouve charts fifty-three translations of Glaspell’s works in various languages, from Fidelity into Russian in 1923 to Trifles into Arabic in 2019. This all leads up to the “curated” conversations that Ozieblo and Gainor conducted with six directors of Glaspell productions at London’s Orange Tree Theatre; New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse; the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada; the Mint Theater Company of New York; and freelance directors Alice Reagan and Meg Roe. The directors’ insights on Trifles, Inheritors, The Verge, Springs Eternal, The People, Woman’s Honor, The Outside, and Alison’s House help one understand the plays. Auriol Smith of Orange Tree Theatre commented on the surprises built into Glaspell’s plays: the audience may not “understand it all, they may say, I don’t know what the hell that was all about, [but] they know it’s about something!” (266). Alex Roe of Metropolitan Playhouse talked about the “game of revelation and concealment in her plays . . . that is playful and engaging” (266). Sally Heckel’s account of making an independent film of A Jury of Her Peers explores how and why she transformed dialogue into on-screen action or substituted camera pans in place of words.The volume concludes with a comprehensive bibliography, a much-needed chronology of Glaspell’s life and works, and an excellent index. Scholars, directors, theater artists and students can now find their way to appropriate sources. Some mysteries and puzzles will persist, however, and this book is sure to raise new questions about this multitalented writer. Further research is needed!

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