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

An impressive body of scholarship on Susan Glaspell has been produced since the millenium. Prior to that, the first wave of Glaspell's recovery was spearheaded by four important books: Marcia Noe's Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland (1983), Mary Papke's still-unparalleled Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993), Veronica Makowsky's critical study Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women (1993), and Linda Ben-Zvi's Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction (1995). By 1995 Ben-Zvi was declaring that Glaspell criticism had "moved to a second stage—assessing the work of this important writer, no longer arguing her case" ("O'Neill's Cape[d] Compatriot," Eugene O'Neill Review 19, nos. 1–2).

This second wave reevaluated Glaspell and her entire oeuvre through a historically oriented "gynocritical" approach, to use Elaine Showalter's terminology, that looks at women's writing as it actually occurred and defines its specific characteristics of language, genre, and literary influence within the cultural networks that impacted it. In this vein, Barbara Ozieblo's 2000 feminist critical biography and Linda Ben-Zvi's 2010 definitive biography have recuperated Glaspell's life, while J. Ellen Gainor's 2001 Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 1915–48 has thoroughly discussed Glaspell's plays within their historical and discursive moments, and Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf's 2005 Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland has exhaustively framed Glaspell's most famous work, Trifles/"A Jury of Her Peers," in the legal and historical milieu of the Margaret Hossack murder case. Major essay collections such as Martha C. Carpentier and Ozieblo's 2006 Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays and Novels of Susan Glaspell and Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy's 2013 Intertextuality in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Other Playwrights have presented critical analysis of a broader variety of Glaspell's works beyond the now-canonical Trifles. A diverse cadre of scholars in these anthologies committed to an intertextual approach connects Glaspell's drama to her fiction, as well as to visual, cinematic, and material culture.

So the question is, what now? If the second wave of Glaspell scholarship has fulfilled the feminist literary critical agenda, what is the direction of the "third wave" for Glaspell scholarship? Noelia Hernando-Real is optimistic. She "firmly believe[es] that Glaspell speaks to us in the 21^st century with a renewed voice," as she declares in Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell ([2011], 3), which sets an excellent example for that third wave. So, too, does the book under consideration, by the French theatre scholar and current vice president of the International Susan Glaspell Society (ISGS), Emeline Jouve. At the risk of being overly reductive: now that the cultural/ historical groundwork is done, we can turn to theory and genre (or form). There is a reason, as Tony Kushner told an audience of ISGS and Eugene O'Neill Society members at the 2015 Provincetown gathering, that Glaspell's Trifles was such an important early influence on him. It was not primarily because of its ground-breaking feminist content, but because structurally it approaches perfection. Just how does Glaspell get every audience to agree that two farmwomen should break the law on behalf of a murderer—through a text that relies principally on objects and unspoken words? Of course not all of Glaspell's works achieve such structural perfection (just ask anyone who has attempted to stage Inheritors); however, whether she is exploring realism or expressionism, regionalism or modernism, Glaspell is always a formal innovator. Her works interrogate linguistic, semiotic, generic, chronological, and spatial structures beneath a veneer of normality that is quickly deconstructed. Thus, Hernando-Real's monograph contributes to the new wave in Glaspell criticism, analyzing in depth "one of the core elements of theater: space" (3) by applying Una Chaudhuri's...