Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 1915-48 (review)

The proliferation of scholarship on the early-20th-century American writer, Susan Glaspell, is significant for a variety of reasons. These critical studies resurrect a "lost woman writer" and an innovator of modern theatre; revise the American canon as well as deepen our understanding of the process of canon formation; and demonstrate the profound intertextuality between artistic texts and social texts. Since the 1970s, feminist critics, in particular, have built upon each others' work and incorporated a range of critical theories for interpreting Glaspell's oeuvre. The focus of most of this scholarship has been on Glaspell's involvement in the theatre: Glaspell played a major role in the development of the avantgarde Provincetown Players between 1915 and 1922 in Greenwich Village; received the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House in 1931, and directed the Federal Theatre Project's Midwest Play Bureau from 1936 to 1938. More recently, critics have turned to her short stories and novels, and have embarked on critical biographies to establish her significance in a range of cultural milieus.¹ More importantly, this scholarship has moved beyond generic criticism to a consideration of the cultural and political discourses that inform her writing. Scholars have situated her work at an important historical moment—the development of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, modernism, and the emergence of global warfare. Aesthetically, they plot the locus of her work in a field that encompasses both social realism and modernist experimentation in a range of forms from farcical comedy to expressionist, poetic drama. Our reward for pursuing these studies is to claim the full legacy of Susan Glaspell.

J. Ellen Gainor's exemplary study, Susan Glaspell in Context, formulates new links between these formal and ideological analyses as she adds layers of historical research to her interpretation of the plays. Her introduction begins as a dialogue with previous scholars who have been "slowly rescuing Glaspell's writing from a comparatively long oblivion" (1). She corrects the narrow assessments by critics C.W.E. Bigsby and Arthur Waterman (for example, their preoccupation with contrasting her to early Provincetown playwright, Eugene O'Neill) that may have led others "to misestimate her writing even in purely aesthetic terms" (3). She also fears that the feminist scholarship that has resurrected Glaspell, though clearly invaluable, might prompt mainstreamers to relegate her to the sphere of identity politics. The boundaries that she establishes for her investigation point to her divergence from previous criticism: "Just as this study opposes a critical tradition that seeks to establish the 'greatness' of a writer or (most often) 'his' individual works, it also resists scholarly inclinations to account for a body of writing under one theoretical rubric [...]" (8).

Here context means transcending the notions of "influence" or "background." Gainor's use of the term has affinities with the concept of intertextuality articulated by Graham Allen in his discussion of Bakhtin and Kristeva: "All texts [...] contain within them the ideological structures and struggles expressed in society through discourse" (2000:36). Arguing that it is "close engagement with her culture that makes Glaspell's theatrical work important historically, creatively, and intellectually" (3), Gainor's thesis is that Glaspell is a "political writer," and more specifically, an American writer whose plays are the "site" of her strongest political statements. Her study traces the dramatic representations of key historical events, such as the World Wars, and links them to the playwright's interpretation of their impact on "individual character, on social morality, on commitment to action, and on a sense of national history and its foundational principles" (9). The framework of analysis is multifaceted, including close readings of the playscripts and a consideration of their innovations in dramatic form and performance strategy. She also considers the devices through which the playwright represents and subverts, often with humor, conventional codes—be they stylistic or cultural.

Each chapter is organized around a selected "primary context" that serves as a "point of...