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

Over the past several decades, playwright and fiction writer Susan Glaspell has begun to receive the scholarly attention she clearly merits. A founding member of the Provincetown Players and – after Eugene O’Neill – their most important dramatist, Glaspell has benefitted from a growing appreciation for the seminal role of the Players in American theatre as well as from a feminist commitment to exploring the contributions of neglected women writers. Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell, by Spanish scholar Noelia Hernando-Real, testifies to the international interest in Glaspell’s work.

Drawing heavily on Una Chaudhuri’s concept of “geopathology,” Hernando-Real surveys the numerous ways that Glaspell constructs characters who are “victims of location” (9). The houses that Glaspell presents on stage are not homes. Images of jail cells, closets, and cages abound in her canon, whether visible to the audience or referred to in the dialogue. Central to Glaspell’s most famous short drama, Trifles, is a bird cage, whose occupant was brutally killed. As Hernando-Real observes, “[M]ost of the characters that endeavor to see their homes as a shelter end up mad, dead, or disheartened by the fact that their places are turned into battlefields” by threatening invaders (81). This motif is, perhaps, sharpest in the case of Claire Archer, the frenetic protagonist of The Verge, one of Glaspell’s most complex long dramas. Locked doors, basement rooms, and an isolated tower cannot protect Claire from the demands of her family and society.

Among her most compelling applications of “geopathology” is Hernando-Real’s discussion of the ironic “American Myth of Mobility” as played out on Glaspell’s stage. A young America billed itself as a land of endless opportunity because of its open spaces; yet this promise was “an appalling lie, especially for her female characters” (32). The wives and mothers who followed their men West – often against their will – found themselves isolated on farms many miles from other women. Minnie Foster, in Trifles, is confined to a secluded Iowa cabin, a victim of both man and nature. As Hernando-Real points out, Glaspell has a penchant for setting her plays during the cold months, when frigid temperatures virtually guarantee an absence of social life.

Social conventions that define what characters can and cannot do are another cause of entrapment in Glaspell’s world. In 1931, long after the demise of the Provincetown Players, Glaspell’s Alison’s House, loosely based on the life of Emily Dickinson, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The titular house is a far grander structure than Minnie Foster’s hovel; yet it is a prison for Alison Stanhope, whose love for a married man can be expressed only through poems she has to keep hidden. Alison’s loneliness is ironically matched by that of her niece Elsa, who followed her heart and has consequently been forbidden to enter her childhood home. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Alison’s House holds out the slight hope that women in the future will not be limited to choosing only among negative options.

Virtually every Glaspell scholar has discussed one of the playwright’s sig-nature strategies: the absent protagonist. In Alison’s House and Bernice, the main characters are dead; while Trifle’s Minnie Wright is in jail in the town. Hernando-Real argues that Glaspell “constructs haunted spaces ...fictional homes where the presence of the absent characters suggests their own vict-image of location” and thus illuminates the entrapment of the characters actually present on stage (135). Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters speak for the imprisoned Minnie Foster Wright, while Alison’s siblings reveal their own anguish as they try to explain her decision to remain locked in the family homestead. Hernando-Real also astutely observes that Glaspell’s “drama is crowded with corpses” (114) both on and offstage – much like the works of her colleague O’Neill. She could and...