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

Following in the footsteps of scholars like Barbara Ozieblo, J. Ellen Gainor, or Kristina Hinz-Bode, all authors of recent monographs on Susan Glaspell’s plays, Noelia Hernando-Real, vice president of the International Susan Glaspell Society, has contributed Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell, a ground-breaking book demonstrating once more that the playwright rightly deserves the honorific title of mother of modern American drama. This fascinating book was published by McFarland & Company, which, it is worth noting, has previously issued several works devoted to Glaspell: The Road to the Temple, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, in 2005; Kristina Hinz-Bode’s Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression, in 2006; and Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, an anthology of Glaspell’s dramatic works edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor, in 2010. Hernando-Real’s contribution to the understanding of the importance of Glaspell in the history of American drama is notable for its originality, as the author explores largely uncharted territories. If she pays tribute to her Glaspellian predecessors whose works are thoroughly discussed throughout her book, Hernando-Real goes beyond the existing studies to open up new perspectives on Glaspell’s plays by focusing on the dramatization of space. Whereas many scholars have recognized the significance of space in the dramatic corpus of this cofounder of the Provincetown Players, it has never been the subject of a comprehensive analysis. In notably reading Glaspell’s plays through the prism of “geopathology,” a concept devised by Una Chaudhuri in Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1995), Hernando-Real considers the synergy between the construction of space and the construction of self.

“Geopathology” refers to the problem of space and the tensions between inclusion and exclusion, home and homelessness. Hernando-Real shows in Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell that the struggle with the problem of space reflects the struggle with the problem of self. According to Hernando-Real, this dialogue between belonging and exile, this tension between feeling at home and feeling estranged, mainly concerns female protagonists; consequently, the study concentrates on Glaspellian heroines, with some references to male characters. Adopting a semiotic approach, Hernando-Real examines how the spatialization of the self is textually codified: it is indeed Glaspell’s dramatic texts rather than performances of the plays that are studied. Hernando-Real’s corpus includes here those of Glaspell’s plays that are set in a home—that is, most of the playwright’s pieces: Suppressed Desires (1915), a play cowritten with George Cram Cook, Trifles (1916), The Outside (1917), Close the Book (1917), Bernice (1919), Chains of Dew (1922), Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), The Comic Artist (1928), a play cowritten with Norman Matson, Alison’s House (1930), and Spring Eternal (1943). The originality of Hernando-Real’s book lies not only in the centrality of space in her approach, which offers a new vision of Glaspell’s plays, but also in the way she structures her analysis, departing from the traditional play-to-play pattern. Rather, she has divided her study into subthemes, discussing the different pieces following these thematic threads in order to bring out their specificities or similarities.

Having devoted her first chapter to the definitions of key notions—such as “space” and “place,” “geopathology,” “home,” “gender,” and “realism”—the author discusses the playwright’s staging of “American geomythologies” by paying specific attention in chapter 2 to the American myth of mobility: she thus notably considers how Glaspell’s female protagonists play an active part in the frontier myth and the pioneer myth, which have traditionally been conceptualized as primarily male myths. Hernando-Real then proceeds to analyze in chapter 3 the tensions between isolation and community by studying the representation of the home as a prison or a shelter in Glaspell’s plays. Chapter 4 centers on the link between space and time and on...