Self and Space in the theater of Susan Glaspell by Noelia Hernando-Real (review)

What’s immediately striking about Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell, Noelia Hernando-Real’s comprehensive new treatment of Glaspell’s use of stage space to explore her characters’ identity and selfhood, is its cover. Hernando-Real has chosen a color photograph of a recent (2008) Orange Tree Theatre production of Glaspell’s Chains of Dew. All of the images that illustrate the text are likewise from productions of her plays in New York and London in the last few years. This is a bold choice—gone are the period photographs of the Provincetown Playhouse; the portraits of Glaspell and her husband, Provincetown leader George Cram Cook, at their typewriters; or the stills of Eugene O’Neill on the beach at Cape Cod that we have seen in many studies. Instead, while respecting this history, Hernando-Real announces at the outset that this is a book about how Glaspell’s encounters with theatrical space and the struggles for self-hood of her characters remain critical, contemporary, and stageable today.

For the O’Neill scholar, what may at first be interesting in the study are the similarities and differences between what Hernando-Real argues is Glaspell’s approach to theatrical space and those of O’Neill. Hernando-Real makes reference to the early O’Neill, contrasting the naturalistic set of Bound East for Cardiff with Glaspell’s use of symbolic or expressionist scenes in her early one-act plays (6). However, her study does not explore such comparisons in detail. Instead, identifying a “new wave in Glaspell criticism” (3), Hernando-Real builds on the now thirty-year tradition of research and recovery of Glaspell to make a systematic career study of her dramaturgy. Hernando-Real is thus part of a new generation of Glaspell scholars that is evaluating not only the large body of Susan Glaspell’s writings, but also the extensive legacy of Glaspell criticism, to synthesize existing approaches and offer new readings of this immensely challenging modern drama pioneer.

As she states in her introduction, Hernando-Real’s aim “is to show the titanic importance of Glaspell’s settings,” a territory covered only tangentially or intermittently by Glaspell scholars such as J. Ellen Gainor, who observes “a thematic relationship between setting and action,” or Marcia Noe, who discusses “region as a metaphor” in Glaspell’s plays. Hernando-Real seeks to unify such approaches, employing “a semiotic system of analysis” that discusses space within the theater but often ranges quite far from the physicality of the actors on stage. It encompasses the implied spaces beyond the settings— the roads and towns and countryside that border the fictional world of the plays, the physical and cultural spaces between American cities or Paris and New York, the mythic landscapes of the American West and Midwest always just off stage, essential metaphors in her oeuvre. To comprehend Glaspell’s use of space in both the microcosm and the macrocosm, Hernando-Real draws on Una Chaudhuri’s formulation of geopathology, a theory that “relies heavily on the configuration of characters as victims of location and their need to escape” (9).

Hernando-Real proves geopathology to be a serviceable tool in a unified analysis of Glaspell’s use of space, although she will also expand and redefine this theory in her discussion of Glaspell. The study thus begins with an explanation of geopathology’s two principles of analysis: “victimage of location, i.e., place becomes the protagonists’ principal problem, and the resulting heroism of departure, the characters’ need to disentangle themselves from their problematic location” (18). Hernando-Real uses geopathology to reveal the many crises of character and tragic life events related to entrapment by place in Glaspell’s plays. An interesting and unacknowledged tension emerges in the study, however, in that Hernando-Real resists the very nomenclature of “victimage of location” of her theoretical model—Hernando-Real cannot ultimately view Glaspell’s resistant female characters as truly “victims” and...