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The Verge stands second only to Trifles as the Glaspell play that has stimulated the most lively, sophisticated, and varied contemporary critical responses, recent scholarship that contrasts intriguingly with the bewilderment reflected in many of the reviews of its original productions in New York (1921) and London (1925). What connects these two bodies of criticism are writers’ attempts to provide a totalizing explanation of the play, to bring to it a coherence and sense of containment that the play itself continues to evade. While their bafflement tended to make the journalists either flatly dismissive or unquestioningly reverential toward the play, its complexities have prompted scholars to approach it from multiple perspectives, perhaps in the hope that some combination of methodologies would ultimately explicate the drama’s nuances of character, language, imagery, and narrative. The plot is relatively simple: Claire Archer, an unconventional woman married to a rather conventional man, attempts to find outlets for her creativity and intellect through horticultural experimentation. She eschews the traditional outlet for women, motherhood, by openly rejecting her daughter from her previous marriage; Claire’s son from her second marriage has died in infancy. The daughter, Elizabeth, has instead been raised by Claire’s sister Adelaide, one of Glaspell’s quintessentially conservative, conventional female characters. From Claire’s perspective Elizabeth appears to be growing into the image of her aunt. The action of the play concerns the culmination of Claire’s most adventurous experiment to date: the flowering of a plant she has bred called “Breath of Life.” Glaspell intertwines and juxtaposes Claire’s botanical work with her human interactions, particularly those with the men in her life: husband Harry, lover Dick, and confidante Tom.1 Claire’s growing dissatisfaction with human relationships and disillusionment with her scientific work coalesce in her mental breakdown and the destruction of what she has cared for most. Drawing on multiple senses of a “verge,” Glaspell constructs her drama around transitions and contrasts: between characters’ beliefs and actions, botanical forms, and states of mind, among others. Claire Archer is a woman on 143 The Verge ✧✧✧✧✧✧✧ the verge of insanity. Her social and familial behavior teeters on the edge of propriety . Her horticultural experiments bring plants to their biological limits, thrusting them toward an evolution into new species. And Glaspell’s dramaturgical form echoes this indeterminacy: the play appears at times to be on the brink of farce; at other moments it mirrors a Strindbergian development from problem play to expressionism and symbolism. Glaspell represents the disintegration of Claire’s world through a complex network of poetic language, floral and religious imagery, and experimentation with theatrical form that continues to challenge and perplex. Glaspell takes as her very subject the impossibility to contain or fully to explain; critics’efforts to do just that, in the case of The Verge, are thus doomed from the outset. If we simply accept this calculated opacity, that may enable us to probe the connections among Glaspell’s dramatic obscurity , her thematic and structural experimentation, and the contexts of the work’s creation, however inconclusive those explorations must remain. During the 1919–20 theater season Glaspell and Cook took a “sabbatical” from the Provincetown Players, in order to replenish their own creative energies , to step back from the artistic and administrative tensions that were mounting among various factions within the Players, and to give other members of the group the opportunity to pursue their own vision for the theater.2 The couple spent much of that period at their home on Cape Cod, where Cook worked on his play The Spring and Glaspell drafted Inheritors (Noe, Critical Biography 109) and may also have worked on The Verge.3 Although it is difficult to date Glaspell’s exact period of composition for the latter, its links to The Spring and to some of Cook’s other writing are intriguing.4 On the levels of plot, setting, and form The Spring and Inheritors appear to have the stronger ties: both feature narratives involving Native Americans; both take place in Black Hawk territory; and both utilize a historical prologue, followed by the main action. But Glaspell’s writing about The Spring in The Road to the Temple reveals other, subtler connections between Cook’s play and The Verge. According to Glaspell, The Spring developed from earlier ideas for a play based on the alchemist Paracelsus. In Cook’s words, “Paracelsus is one of the flaming minds of the world—his soul a crucible in which the elements of...

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