Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (review)

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a founder of the Provincetown Players, a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, an accomplished actress, a successful novelist and, in her later years, Director of the Midwest Playwrights Bureau of the Federal Theatre Project. Yet by the middle of the 20th century, Glaspell had been reduced to a theatrical footnote, primarily remembered, when remembered at all, as the author of Trifles (1916) and the "discoverer" of Eugene O'Neill. Linda Ben-Zvi's biography joins a growing roster of scholarly works that reassess Glaspell's place in American drama and theatre history.

Ben-Zvi's book moves gracefully among biography, cultural history, theatre history, and dramatic criticism. Glaspell's creative world is inextricably bound up with her private life and Ben-Zvi demonstrates that she was at once a true heir of her Midwestern pioneer ancestors and a rebel who chafed against the social restrictions of her conservative milieu. The Midwest remained the setting of many of Glaspell's best dramas and novels, but it was in the bohemian East, especially with the Provincetown Players, that her career flourished. Her husband, George Cram (Jig) Cook, was the inspiration behind the Players, while Glaspell was a vital part of the engine that kept it running. Ben-Zvi is more generous to Cook than several other scholars have been. She acknowledges that Cook was a mercurial, hard-drinking man who lived primarily on Glaspell's earnings yet argues that the two were remarkably compatible.

Not surprisingly, the longest chapter in this biography is devoted to the Provincetown Players, this nation's seminal Little Theatre. The Players produced 11 of Glaspell's works—a number surpassed only by the 16 O'Neill dramas they presented. In the matter of this famous colleague, Ben-Zvi doesn't simply cast Glaspell as one of the first to recognize O'Neill's genius but detects ways in which her work likely inspired his. Even if the similarities between Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, for example, are not quite as "striking" as Ben-Zvi suggests, she identifies an array of motifs and stylistic devices that O'Neill might well have adapted from Glaspell's drama when he created his expressionist classic. Ben-Zvi also argues convincingly that O'Neill borrowed elements of The Verge's Claire Archer when he created Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude. The Provincetown Players was a tightly knit company in which influences ran in all directions; O'Neill was a part of that group, not an isolated genius who happened to land on their doorstep. Glaspell and Cook left the Provincetown Players in early 1922 largely over artistic differences with members who sought to take the theatre in a more commercial direction. Cook died two years later in Greece; Glaspell returned to the United States. While her last years were primarily devoted to writing fiction, Glaspell did complete a small number of plays, including Alison's House, which earned her the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Ben-Zvi navigates deftly through the furor that followed this honor—many critics were outraged by the choice—pointing out that reviewers were so fixated on the similarities between Glaspell's heroine and Emily Dickinson that they ignored the play itself.

The canonization of the successful O'Neill at the expense of his Provincetown colleagues was part of a larger pattern. The initial impetus for Ben-Zvi's biography was feminist in the broadest sense: while researching an unrelated project at the Library of Congress in 1980, Ben-Zvi responded with "shock and anger" when she first recognized the range of Glaspell's work and "the extent of her erasure from the American dramatic and literary canons" (x). Feminist scholarship has always stressed that literary works are deeply embedded in their respective cultures. Accordingly, Ben-Zvi analyzes the ways in which social and political events framed Glaspell's plays, particularly in relation to such issues as domestic oppression...