Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture and Politics 1915-1948 (review)

Susan Glaspell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, the co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and its second most prolific playwright. In this new book, J. Ellen Gainor shows how life, art, and context interact and inform each other, demonstrating how Glaspell's experiences and dramatic output reflect many cultural patterns that obtained in America during the first half of the twentieth century.

Gainor's project is to persuade the reader that Glaspell's plays are important primarily for their close engagement with the cultural issues of her day and that the most productive way to approach them is to read them intertextually, placing them in dialogue with a number of contemporary texts and social practices. In her introduction Gainor asserts that she writes in opposition to the aesthetic criticism of the early Glaspell scholars, work that Gainor believes has obscured such strengths of Glaspell's dramaturgy as "its experimentation with form, its cogent engagement with social and political issues, its central concern with the role of women, its humor" (3).

A thorough examination of past Glaspell scholarship reveals many discussions of Glaspell's experimentation with form, engagement with social and political issues, and concern with the role of women (Gainor has a point about Glaspell's humor). Gainor's study is, however, the first to focus extensively and exclusively on the Glaspell dramatic canon and illuminates it in a number of groundbreaking ways. Gainor demonstrates impressive expertise and painstakingly thorough research, particularly in the areas of American theatre history, theories of theatre, production history, stagecraft, and critical reception, as she situates each play with respect to pertinent texts and cultural pressure points, thus complicating our understanding and enriching our appreciation of Glaspell's life and work.

These intertextual readings make a number of valuable and original contributions. Gainor's account of the history of and critical discourse about the one-act play in the United States is useful not only for the light it sheds on this art form but also for the well-informed case it makes for Glaspell's contribution to American theatre in establishing the one-act play as a legitimate form. Equally valuable are Gainor's efforts to situate "Suppressed Desires" (1914) within the discourse on psychoanalysis in early twentieth-century America, as well as her analysis of Chains of Dew (1922) within the context of World War I era birth control activism, her examination of "Tickless Time" (1918) as enacting Bergsonian philosophy, and her reading of Alison's House (1930) against cultural constructions of Emily Dickinson.

One of the book's strongest contributions is its treatment of little-studied plays such as The Comic Artist (1927) and Springs Eternal (1945). Gainor's approach to the former, shaped by an inquiry into the history and criticism of cartooning in America, results in an insightful reading of the work as enacting the conflict between popular and high culture in this country. Although I have never liked the unpublished and unproduced Springs Eternal, I was able to see some merit in the work after reading Gainor's careful efforts not only to consider the play within the political and theatrical contexts of the 1940s but also to discuss parallels with Glaspell's earlier war play, Inheritors (1921). I was surprised, in light of the emphasis on cultural context, that Gainor did not discuss Woman's Honor (1918) in terms of the contemporary dramatic dialogue about the double standard, as seen in such plays as Rachel Crother's A Man's World (1909), Augustus Thomas's As a Man Thinks (1911), and Jesse Lynch Williams's Why Marry? (1917). But I was highly impressed by Gainor's ability to shed new light on the much-discussed "Trifles" (1916) by drawing on her knowledge of detective literature and of the Provincetown Players' production practices to challenge persuasively W. B. Worthen's...