Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry, and: Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell (review)

{ 188 } BOOK REV IEWS in accordance with our own interests, expertise, and access to supplementary materials. Although our individual classes will therefore cover some different material, we believe the design of the book will allow us to engage the students in similar explorations of questions about the nature of cultural history itself (in fact, teaching strategies on the Routledge Web site suggest that flexibility of approach is one of the main goals of the book’s design). We are excited about the possibilities this text represents and hope it will encourage our students to think about performance across both time and cultures and draw their attention to the various ways theatre history is written. The authors articulate that the text is not intended to be completely inclusive or exhaustive and are aware that a revision is called for. A slightly retooled version would be a welcome addition to the texts on performance and the histories of theatre. —NOREEN C. BARNES —AARON D. ANDERSON Virginia Commonwealth University Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry. Edited and with an introduction by Martha C. Carpentier. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 117 pp. $59.99 cloth. Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell. Edited by Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 307 pp. $90.00 cloth, $35.00 paper. These two anthologies are welcome additions to the rapidly growing body of Susan Glaspell criticism. Drawing on contributors from around the world, the books testify to the interest in Glaspell at home and abroad as well as her appeal to a new generation of scholars just emerging from graduate schools. Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry is a slim volume (seven essays) devoted to mapping out a range of strategies that can be fruitfully applied to Glaspell’s canon, while Disclosing Intertextualities includes fifteen essays that endeavor to place Glaspell in a diverse range of intellectual, cultural, dramatic, literary, social, and political contexts. The majority of pieces in Susan Glaspell: New Directions address Glaspell’s \ { 189 } BOOK REV IEWS plays, the most familiar segment of her canon. Barbara Ozieblo discusses the unpublished Chains of Dew, a witty spoof of male hypocrisy and dependency that suffered a disastrous production by the Provincetown Players. Ozieblo sees this comedy about birth control as a successor to Shaw’s more didactic Mrs. Warren ’s Profession, arguing that Glaspell employs an unusually light touch here because she was aiming at a Broadway audience rather than more liberal Provincetown patrons. Lucia V. Sander adds to the ongoing project of placing Glaspell in the context of her Players colleagues with a comparison of Trifles and Eugene O’Neill’s monologue Before Breakfast, while Marie Molnar goes farther afield in her search for progenitors, making a convincing claim that Glaspell “uses Sophocles’Antigone as a subtext and a basis for the structure of her play”Inheritors (38). Madeline Morton, she argues, is a modern-day Antigone who opposes not only the state but also “the phallogocentric discourse” that supports it (44). Thanks to scholar Linda Ben-Zvi, Glaspell students know that Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers” (the short story derived from the play) are based on the murder trial of Margaret Hossack, which Glaspell covered in her days as a reporter . Patricia L. Bryan and J. Ellen Gainor suggest two more possible judicial influences on the dramatist. Bryan argues that both Trifles and Glaspell’s short story “The Plea” have their roots in the 1889 case of an Iowa boy who murdered his parents. The boy’s fate is reflected in“The Plea,”which Bryan believes“foreshadows ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ in portraying the importance of empathic understanding in legal decision-making”(58). Gainor makes a particularly crucial point in her essay, which addresses the concept of “slander per se”: “involving accusations of sexual impropriety by women” (74), this legal category reflected the cultural belief that a woman’s purity was her most precious possession—a view that is propounded, debated, dissected, and mocked by various characters in Glaspell’s comedy Woman’s Honor. In the final pieces in Susan Glaspell: New Directions, Mary E. Papke and Kristina Hinz-Bode turn...