Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion by Emeline Jouve (review)

With a rush of publications on Susan Glaspell since the mid-1990s, the past twenty years have seen a wide array of approaches to her work, ranging from linguistic, to intertextual, to semiotic analyses. While many of these studies have noted a rebellious drive underpinning Glaspell's radical dramaturgy, Emeline Jouve's book aims at being the first comprehensive analysis of Glaspell's dramatic texts "from the perspective of rebellion" (12). Although Jouve provides sporadic discussions of the technical innovations of Glaspell's work, the core analysis is basically character-oriented, centering on the playwright's characterization of rebels in battle with oppressive conventions. Jouve juxtaposes Glaspell's theatre of rebellion with "the theatre of revolt," Robert Brustein's concept of modern drama as "the theatre of the great insurgent modern dramatists, where myths of rebellion are enacted" (13). By aligning Glaspell with "the great insurgent modern dramatists," Jouve offers a corrective to Brustein's exclusionary mapping of predominantly male dramatic modernism. She thus tempers his focus on Eugene O'Neill, "the father" of American modern drama, and remedies his omission of Glaspell, O'Neill's most talented female colleague in the Provincetown Players and deservedly the "mother" of American modern drama. Jouve's work aspires to restore Glaspell to the position she deserves.

The book explores thirteen plays by Glaspell. While Jouve excludes the three pieces that Glaspell wrote in collaboration with her male companions, she includes instead another three plays that never made it to the stage: Springs Eternal (1943); Wings, incomplete and undated; and the recently discovered Free Laughter (1919). Of particular note are the latter two plays, which have never before been studied by scholars. The book is structured in three parts, which represent the three facets of the playwright's rebellious drive: "denunciation," "resistance," and "hope." Each part consists of three chapters that tackle plays either individually or in combination.

Beginning her career as a dramatist in the 1910s, Glaspell wrote plays suffused with the zeitgeist of the Progressive era, inspired as she was to write by "the duplicity of American democracy" (21). Part 1, "Susan Glaspell's Drama of Denunciation," examines the political significance of her work in two arenas: women's rights and freedom of speech. Exploring how Trifles (1916), Woman's Honor (1918), and Alison's House (1930) address the social conventions limiting women in legal and public spaces, Jouve reveals Glaspell's interest in the paradox of an American democracy that excludes half of the nation's population. Trifles claims more pages than the others, as Jouve considers how the playwright's first solo play reflected contemporary history and set the tone of her subsequent plays about social injustices. The most compelling chapter in the book may be chapter 3, which groups together Close the Book (1917), Free Laughter, and Inheritors (1921), the plays that denounce the anti-pluralist governmental policies related to deportation and the infringement on free speech in the 1910s. Especially significant is Jouve's pioneering study of Free Laughter, a satire, patterned on a medieval morality play, about a tyrant—a satire that Jouve interprets as an Orwellian-themed parody of the national jingoism and despotic policymaking during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Jouve's examination of Glaspell's overtly political plays against the historical backdrop of the US participation in the two world wars is informative and helpful, particularly in chapter 3, as well as in the discussion of Springs Eternal in chapter 4, which draws widely on references ranging from John Reed, to John Dewey, to the pamphlet of the 1939–40 New York World's Fair.

Part 2, "Susan Glaspell's Drama of Resistance," categorizes the two types of rebels staged by the playwright. Jouve argues that the "idealist rebels," featured in The People (1917), Inheritors, and Springs Eternal, are motivated by altruism to serve the public good. Madeline in Inheritors epitomizes the type, being a Thoreauvian rebel of...