Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion by Emeline Jouve (review)

Although a best-selling, Pulitzer-prize-winning author in her day, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) and her work were thrust into obscurity by the male-focused literary canon of the mid-twentieth century. It is thus gratifying to see the outpouring of scholarship on her work since the 1980s. Much of that scholarship has fittingly stressed the highly important feminist aspects of Glaspell’s oeuvre. Emeline Jouve’s Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion is a significant and worthy contribution to more recent criticism placing Glaspell in a broader context, namely politics, which includes, but is not limited to, women’s rights. In Jouve’s words, since “Glaspell stressed the performative power of literature, which she viewed as a weapon against oppression” (1), this book provides “a comprehensive analysis of the dramatist’s work from the perspective of rebellion” (12). Jouve engages Robert Brustein’s concept of “‘modern drama’ as intrinsically linked to the notion of rebellion” (12), but differentiates Glaspell’s work because Glaspell “propos[es] solutions in her plays instead of restricting her dramatic revolt merely to accusation,” and thus “Glaspell’s drama can be defined as a drama of positive revolt, and therefore a drama of hope” (17).

Jouve organizes her argument about Glaspell’s sole-authored dramatic texts (not productions of the plays) into three parts, with some plays discussed in more than one part as thematically appropriate. Part 1, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Denunciation,” delineates Glaspell’s exposition of “the duplicity of American democracy” (21), the failure of the United States to live up to its democratic ideals, particularly women’s rights as human rights and freedom of speech. Jouve’s treatment of Trifles (1916) is the least interesting in terms of originality but provides a solid synthesis of scholarship on the play. In a fine discussion of women’s domestic space as a prison that “literalizes the metaphor of social invisibility” (59) in Trifles, Woman’s Honor (1918), and Alison’s House (1930), Jouve valorizes the second-wave feminist slogan that the personal is political. The domestic prison in these plays can also serve “as the locus of creative freedom, the place where the female artist makes her own personal space to write and escape her reality and alienating conditions” (68). Jouve illustrates the importance of free speech to Glaspell’s politics and poetics in her readings of Close the Book (1917) and Inheritors (1921) and in her interesting and original analysis of the largely undiscussed Free Laughter (1919). Jouve points out that free speech, for Glaspell, is lost not only through its suppression, but through propaganda, false stories about American history that deny legitimacy to Native Americans, immigrants, women, and other groups targeted for marginalization.

In part 2, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Resistance,” Jouve divides Glaspell’s resisters into “Idealist Rebels” and “Individualist Rebels.” In The People (1917), Inheritors, and Springs Eternal (1943), she argues convincingly, the idealists resist oppression because they are devoted to democratic concepts much larger than themselves. In contrast are the individualists in The Outside (1917), Wings (manuscript fragment, date undetermined), Alison’s House, and The Verge (1921), whom Jouve compares to Camus’s revolutionists in their determination to destroy the rights and even the lives of others if necessary to preserve their own untrammeled liberty (131). The most extreme example, as Jouve argues in Chapter 6, “‘The Madwoman in the Tower’: Rebelling Against the Community,” is The Verge’s Claire Archer, who repudiates her daughter and murders her aspiring lover. This chapter is the finest in the book in that it provides one of the best syntheses of critical views about this play that I have encountered as well as an intriguing argument about the way that, unlike the protagonists of many of Glaspell’s other plays, “Claire reverses the conventional logic by claiming otherness as her ultimate objective, as she views it in terms of empowerment rather than entrapment” (147...