Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times by Linda Ben-Zvi (review)

“Pioneer.” Linda Ben-Zvi could not have chosen a more appropriate term to introduce Susan Glaspell (1876‒1948) in her biography, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (xii), winner of the 2005 Special Jury Prize of the American Library Association. Glaspell pioneered modern drama in the United States, exploring new forms in each of the fifteen plays she wrote, from her expressionistic The Verge to her psychological Bernice, and from her absurdist Woman’s Honor to her existentialist The Outside. She was a pioneer in her portrayal of female characters who refused traditional definitions of womanhood. She was also original in making use of the stage to show the struggles of women and to demand changes in women’s lives toward a more equal society. And, doing justice to her own pioneer ancestors, Glaspell was never afraid of venturing out toward unknown domains, both in her writing and personal life.

Ben-Zvi is among the pioneers in Glaspell studies. Following in the footsteps of predecessors such as Arthur Waterman in the 1960s and, most notably, Marcia Noe in the 1980s, she has contributed substantially to our understanding of Glaspell. Her pioneering studies on this long-neglected playwright, novelist, and short-story writer started with comparative studies exploring relationships between Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill, through whom she had arrived at Glaspell. With the distance time provides, it is interesting to reread those early articles. For example, in her earliest one, “Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill” (1982), published in the Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Ben-Zvi timidly suggests that Glaspell’s The Verge might have influenced the expressionistic form of The Emperor Jones. Similarly, in “Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill: The Imagery of Gender” (1986), also published in the Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, she explicitly says she does not wish to prove “influence,” but just to read the works of these playwrights in “juxtaposition.” It seems obvious that Ben-Zvi’s strategy was to argue Glaspell’s case by putting her side by side with O’Neill, as in their old Provincetown Players days, in a way that would nourish this metaphor: if O’Neill is the father of US modern drama, we should recognize in Glaspell the necessary mother. Over twenty years later, in the biography, Ben-Zvi makes strong claims about how Glaspell’s works were “obvious catalysts” for O’Neill’s (252). She convincingly argues that The Verge inspired not only The Emperor Jones, but also The Hairy Ape and even Strange Interlude. The time for delicate maternal imagery was over.

The new millennium witnessed steadily increasing scholarly attention to Glaspell’s life and work. The International Susan Glaspell Society was founded in 2003, and Ben-Zvi’s Susan Glaspell was the fourth major monograph devoted to that author, preceded by Barbara Ozieblo’s Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (2000), J. Ellen Gainor’s Susan Glaspell in Context (2001), and Martha C. Carpentier’s The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell (2001). All these works, and most notably Ozieblo’s and Carpentier’s, are products of second-wave feminists, authored by women who, moved by the resuscitation of Glaspell by Judith Fetterley’s and Annette Kolodny’s seminal work on “A Jury of Her Peers,” set out to rescue Glaspell from the agents of the patriarchal canon who had denied her worth. In the preface to the biography, Ben-Zvi acknowledges that her research started within this second-wave feminist framework, which, in her own words, would tell the story of Glaspell as “a victim, beset by patriarchal villains [O’Neill and George Cram Cook] who were somehow responsible for her erasure” (xi). During her work, however, she abandoned the feminist “savior” role (xi). Certainly, her biography is not as overtly feminist as Ozieblo’s, or as Carpentier’s approach to Glaspell’s fiction, but, covertly, Ben-Zvi reveals her own feminist beliefs. For example, she acknowledges the ill effect on Glaspell’s career of male...