Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression (review)

{ 156 } BOOK REV IEWS tainment drew stars away from the major circuits. These factors, as well as an unwillingness to adjust to the new economic landscape, resulted in the eventual disintegration of the monopolies. As with the preceding sections, Wertheim provides exhaustive financial data and first-person accounts of this demise , concluding his narrative with the death of Edward Albee in 1930. Wertheim’s account of the rise and fall of the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits is entirely straightforward in its approach, eschewing any theoretical underpinning. This sort of history doesn’t necessarily need that foundation, however, as its reliance on hard economic data and primary- and secondarysource accounts creates a clear and thorough narrative of a key period in American popular entertainment. Wertheim also declines to give any substantial analysis of the actual content of the acts that were being performed on the Keith-Albee and Orpheum stages, but again, this limitation is in keeping with the goal of the study. Vaudeville Wars ultimately overcomes its potential drawbacks by serving as a strikingly in-depth and comprehensive accounting of the economic history and managerial structure of big-time vaudeville. —TYLER AUGUST SMITH University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression. By Kristina Hinz-Bode. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 292 pp. $45.00 cloth. Susan Glaspell (1876–1948), Pulitzer Prize winner, playwright, and novelist, was a founding member of the Provincetown Players and undoubtedly a significant figure on the theatrical scene in early-twentieth-century America. However, in the early 1980s she was virtually unknown to specialists of American theatre and American literature alike. In spite of the work done in the last thirty years by scholars intent on recovering the names of writers silenced by the patriarchal canon, and in spite of the surge of interest in Glaspell (see www.susanglaspell. org for recent publications and performances), Glaspell is still generally known only for the play Trifles or the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” a rewrite of the earlier piece. Kristina Hinz-Bode’s Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression is a significant addition to Glaspell studies: it goes beyond not only Trifles but also the until recently dominant feminist approach to her work. The year 2006 also saw the publication of two volumes of essays, Disclosing Intertextu- \ { 157 } BOOK REV IEWS alities: the Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell (ed. Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo) and Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry (ed. Martha Carpentier), that approach Glaspell’s oeuvre from a variety of perspectives .And even earlier, J. Ellen Gainor’s Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48 (2001) had concentrated on a cultural study of the plays, albeit with a strong feminist stance. Hinz-Bode, a youngergeneration scholar, refutes the purely feminist interpretations that second-wave critics have favored and focuses instead on the metaphysical or philosophical substratum of selected Glaspell plays—a stance that permits her to highlight the complexity of the playwright’s vision and to place her firmly within the context of early-twentieth-century thought and artistic expression. Contemporary reviewers of Glaspell’s plays were often disconcerted by what they considered an excess of verbosity and also by a seemingly ambivalent attitude toward human relationships. Glaspell’s plays were considered“talky,”as were those of G. B. Shaw, but her use of language to reflect the process of creation of meaning has generally been recognized by feminist critics as an example of écriture féminine some fifty years before the French theorists coined the term (see Marcia Noe,“The Verge: L’Écriture Féminine at the Provincetown,”in Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, ed.Linda Ben-Zvi [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995]). On the other hand, critics have agreed that one of Glaspell’s principal themes is the problem of individual freedom in society : in an early short story (1914), her young protagonist questions whether she should accept the “life in chains” that “affection and obligation” seemed to impose on her (“The Rules of the Institution,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, January 1914, 208), and these words are repeated in one...