Intertextuality In American Drama: Critical Essays On Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller And Other Playwrights edited by Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy (review)

Modernists devoted to Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller will especially welcome the range of thought and discussion provided in the essays within this volume. While the works of John Guare, Maureen Watkins, and Sophie Treadwell are also examined, the majority of the essays focus on Glaspell and O’Neill. Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy, the editors of Intertextuality in American Drama, have brought together contributors with backgrounds “as diverse as their critical approaches,” including “the work of researchers at every stage of their career” (3). In the introduction, Eisenhauer traces the meaning of “intertexuality” to Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva, who claimed “that meaning [within a text] is always mediated through the multitude of other texts that lie behind the writer and the reader’s use and decoding of meaning” (2). Contributors in this collection discuss not only how the works of other writers and texts have influenced playwrights but also the influence of family, mentors, actors, and the cultural milieu.

The editors have divided the essays into two sections: “Literary Intertextuality,” which includes articles that explore plays for their intertextual relationship to poems and plays and performances, and “Cultural Intertextuality,” which looks at sources that are not literary (3). In the first subsection, “Poets,” Herman Daniel Farrell III and Rupendra Guha Majumdar offer contrasting and insightful essays concerning O’Neill’s 1924 adaptation of Coleridge’s epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Readers might want to reread the poem in order to fully appreciate O’Neill’s undertaking, as well as the discussion in the essays. Farrell adopts a “structuralist approach to intertextual criticism” (10), maintaining that O’Neill’s adaptation of the poem was a particular moment in his writing career when he willingly diminished his authorial originality in deference to the construction of the dramatic work. On the other hand, Majumdar asserts that many influences contributed to O’Neill’s commercially unsuccessful adaptation of Coleridge’s poem. He examines a number of O’Neill plays, pointing out the influence of the Ancient Mariner by “virtue of its combined dramatic, visual and symbolic richness” (26). Similarly, in a following essay Aurélie Sanchez posits that in his last extant play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill borrowed not only from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream but from Keats’s odes and their “romantic symbolism in the form of references to the moonlight” (37).

In the same section, Michael Winetsky and Noelia Hernando-Real explore intertextuality in Susan Glaspell’s writings. “German, British, and American Romanticism are all frequently referenced in Glaspell’s work,” asserts Winetsky (53). Quoting from Glaspell’s novels The Glory of the Conquered and Judd Rankin’s Daughter, as well as her play Chains of Dew, he illustrates Glaspell’s use of Romantic allusion, noting her references to Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Where Winetsky looks at Glaspell’s oeuvre, Hernando-Real focuses her discussion on Alison’s House, for which Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. In this three-act drama, the poet Emily Dickinson “serves not only as a model for one character,” but her “words reverberate quite overtly” (63). Hernando-Real draws parallels between the two women, the feminism within their writings and their “experimentation with form” (65–66); she then effectively hones in on dramatic links between the two writers and examines Glaspell’s use of Dickinson’s imagery.

In the second subsection, “Playwrights and Performance Texts,” Kristin Bennett tackles “An Intertextuality Study of Thornton Wilder’s Women” (76). Bennett traces Wilder’s “attentiveness to woman’s potential” through his relationship with his mother and sisters who “defied the nineteenth-century definitions and constraints that were believed to hinder women.” Even so, Wilder presents femininity “as a struggle between an untapped personal potential...