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On the Edge: The Plays of Susan Glaspell CHRISTINE DYMKOWSKI Until recently, Susan Glaspell has been little more than "a footnote in the history ofdrama," remembered chiefly for her association with Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players; her contemporary reputation as one of the two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America may come as a legitimate surprise even to serious students ofdramatic history. I Her plays have rarely been performed by professional companies and, apart from the often-anthologized Trifles, have been unavailable in print;> such marginalization ofGlaspell's work is the most obvious way in which her drama can be said to be "on the edge." Its own preoccupation with the limits of experience is another. Central to Glaspell's plays is a concern with fulfilling life's potential, going beyond the confines of convention, safety, and ease to new and uncharted possibilities, both social and personal. This need to take life to its limits and push beyond them implies a paradoxical view of life's margins as central to human experience - as the cutting edge that marks the difference between mere existence and real living. This edge is imbued with both possibility and danger, the one concomitant with the other; Glaspell makes this clear not only in the plays but in her account of her response to the Provincetown dunes: Ihave apicture ofJig [herhusbandJat the edge ofthe dunes, standingagainst the woods, that line he and I loved where the woods send out the life that can meet the sand. and the sand in tum tries to cover the woods - a fighting-line, the front line.3 It is, in the widest sense, the front line between life and death. This focal point is at once evident in the titles of some of Glaspell's plays: The Outside and The Verge speak for themselves, while Trifles ironically alludes to the discrepancy between the vitality of women's experience and the male view of it as petty. Indeed, inherent in almost all of Glaspell's work is a 92 CHRISTINE DYMKOWSKI consciousness that identifies women as outside the mainstream of life and thus capable of shaping it anew. The paradoxically central nature of the edge informs Olaspell's theatrical methods and themes. Her ftfst play, Trifles (1916),4 illustrates its use in several ways, the irony ofthe title already having been noted. The plot revolves around the visit to a farmhouse by County Attorney Henderson and Sheriff Peters to investigate the murder ofJohn Wright; they are accompanied by the farmer who discovered the murder and, almost incidentally, by the farmer's and sheriffs wives. The men's assumption is that Minnie Wright, already in custody for the crime, has killed her husband, and they are there to search the house for clues to a motive. The audience undoubtedly sees them as protagonists at the start ofthe play. The stage directions immediately call attention to the women's marginality: the men, "much bundled up" against the freezing cold, "go at once to the stove" in the Wrights' kitchen, while the women who follow them in do so "slowly, and stand close together near the door" (p. 36). The separateness ofthe female and male worlds is thus immediately established visually and then reinforced by the dialogue: MRS. PETERS (10 the other woman) Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. (to the LAWYER) She worried about that when it turned so cold. ... SHERIFF Well, can you beat the women [sic]! Held for murder and worryin' about herpreserves. COUNTY AITORNEY I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about. HALE Well, women are used to worrying over trifles. (The two women move a littLe closer together.) (p. 38) Not surprisingly, the women are relegated to the kitchen, while the men's attention turns to the rest ofthe house, particularly the bedroom where the crime was committed: "You're convinced that there was nothing important here nothing that would point to any motive," Henderson asks Peters, and is assured thatthere is "Nothing here but kitchen things" (p. 38). However, while the men view the kitchen as marginal to their purpose, the drama stays centered there where...

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