Drama

The common thread in this year’s studies is an effort to contextualize plays, particularly rich both in number of full-length studies and in the diverse directions they pursue. Especially bountiful are those studies that examine previously overlooked or underexposed historical and theoretical issues underlying the plays.

i Theoretical Approaches

Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy have edited a substantial volume titled Intertextuality in American Drama, working with the O’Neill, Glaspell, Wilder, and Arthur Miller societies. The volume is established on Julia Kristeva’s assertion that “meaning is always mediated through the multitude of other texts.” In her words, “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption of another.” This concept is used in the largest sense in Michael Winetsky’s “Trailing Clouds of Glory: Glaspell, Ideology and Conflict” (pp. 52–63), which examines the use of Romantic poets first to create the hope “that a religion of humanity” might create an ideal “popular American ethics.” But later Winetsky charts Glaspell’s loss of idealism as the elite pulled “away from popular engagement with popular concerns. As such, Glaspell’s references to Romanticism track the evolution of the concept of culture during the first half of the twentieth century in the United States.” A parallel argument is made by Franklin J. Lasik (pp. 114–25), seeing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland as creating the ideal “female utopia.” That ideal frustrates Glaspell’s heroine on a similar quest in The Verge: “Rather than an arrival into a peaceful utopia, she is constantly at war with herself and others, fighting to make her point of view understood and heard, and she must ultimately construct her own utopia herself, out of the air, as it were.”

Another of Glaspell’s revolutionary heroines is Madeline in Inheritors, who fights against racist xenophobia in Iowa. Sara Withers’s essay on this play (pp. 126–42) is more theoretically challenging, arguing that “American history itself functions in Inheritors as an intertext, through which the past persists as a vital presence that both shapes and is shaped by the contemporary present.” Withers argues that Glaspell depicts the East Coast as having “lost touch with its radical history and instead fetishizes an ossified version of the American revolutionary character.” The true revolutionary, however, is found in the West, in the 1879 first act of the play, and then in the contemporary 1921 subsequent acts. What makes Withers’s approach unusual is the linking of the idea of ephemeral performance to the idea of history, which must be reenacted and reper-formed or it will ossify into anti-immigration bigotry: “The impossibility of preserving something dynamic is ultimately not a paradox to be got around,” she explains, “but rather is precisely the point for Glaspell. In Inheritors, valor is found in the struggle to embody a revolutionary and innovatory spirit that is nonetheless informed and indebted to the past.” The best example is when Madeline recalls Fred Jordan’s conscientious objection to World War I and imprisonment, as she draws a cell on the floor in chalk, imprisoning herself in a reenactment of “an idealism associated with America’s revolutionary past (freedom of speech and dissent), a place where ironically the ‘locked up’ individual is more American than the free.”

A counterargument on performance is offered by Kristin Bennett in “The Tragic Heroine: An Intertextual Study of Thornton Wilder’s Women in The Skin of Our Teeth, The Long Christmas Dinner, and Our Town” (pp. 76–90). Bennett notes that contemporary criticism ignores Wilder because his characters are not individuals sculpted from specific social forces, but “rather than experiencing the world for themselves, they allow the rules and regulations established by their ancestors to shape their lives.” She argues, however, that this allows them to be analyzed through Judith Butler’s view of gender as performance, revealing the repression that “inhibits humans from existing as unfettered agents within their own lives.” This approach sounds restrictive but allows Bennett to contrast the mothers/women with the younger, unfettered girls who are more free. For example, in The Skin of Our Teeth, “because her...