Fruits of Anger
By J. Ellen Gainor
Susan Glaspell: Her Life and
Times
By Linda Ben-Zvi
Oxford University Press
448 pp., 29 halftones
$45
With what has by now become a familiar
trope in Susan Glaspell studies, Linda Ben-Zvi opens her new biography
of Glaspell on a note of anger: anger at an American literary
and theatrical tradition that had "disremembered" an important
woman writer; anger at the scholarship that had consistently devalued
Glaspell at the same time that it championed her male colleagues;
and even anger at herself for some unexamined, early collusion
in these practices. Ben-Zvi soon thereafter describes the epiphanic
moment when she began to question this tradition--when she started
to ask herself and others who this woman was and why there was
so little analysis of her life and work. Her quest for answers
has led her to produce a compelling and much-needed corrective
to this legacy of dismissal and neglect. Susan Glaspell: Her
Life and Times both complements the burgeoning field of Glaspell
studies and provides nuanced and fresh readings of Glaspell's
oeuvre. (Full disclosure: I am the author of the first full-length
study of Glaspell's dramaturgy and Ben-Zvi's co-editor on the
forthcoming Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell.)
For more than a quarter century, feminist
critics and others have endeavored to return Glaspell (1876-1948)
to the position of cultural prominence she held during her lifetime.
Over the years, the arc of Glaspell studies has quite neatly paralleled
the evolution of Anglo-American feminist criticism. In fact, Glaspell
became a subject of some of the discipline's most influential
early essays, including Annette Kolodny's "A Map for Rereading"
and Judith Fetterley's "Reading about Reading." From that first
stage of basic retrieval of lost women writers, through subsequent
more thorough critical engagements with texts and issues of authorial
identity and creativity (such as those connected with critical
race studies, ethnic studies, and LGBT studies), and, more recently,
in the arena of cultural studies and more integrated scholarship
that considers women writers as part of broader historical, geographic,
and economic contexts, Glaspell has been central. Ben-Zvi alludes
to each of these stages, passed through and folded into her almost-two-decades-long
process of research and composition, but wisely chooses not to
dwell on the troubling scholarly traditions and patriarchal pronouncements
prior Glaspell scholarship has had to overturn. Nevertheless,
Ben-Zvi understands that such dismissive critical traditions linger,
and that Glaspell's story may still be unfamiliar to many readers.
She thus builds on the more recent feminist critical foundation,
calculatedly treating Glaspell's validity as an influential figure
as a given and organizing the biography around her accomplishments.
Glaspell's many achievements include the
co-founding of the Provincetown Players. In the teens and early
twenties she was identified, along with Eugene O'Neill, as one
the country's leading dramatists. She was only the second woman,
after Zona Gale in 1921, to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama
with Alison's House (1931). She was an award-winning
fiction writer, whose short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its
dramatic counterpart, Trifles (1915/16), were immediately
identified as landmark texts. Her later novels appeared on best-seller
lists around the country. And in the 1930s, she served as the
Director of the Midwest Play Bureau for the Federal Theatre Project.
Given this catalogue of triumphs, Ben-Zvi unsurprisingly characterizes
Glaspell as a "pioneer," a woman who, throughout her life, challenged
assumptions of what women could or should do and repeatedly overcame
private and public obstacles to her creative and personal fulfillment.
Ben-Zvi sees a resonance between the progressive
era's influence on Glaspell and a number of the themes that pervade
her writing. First, Ben-Zvi perceives in Glaspell an overarching
desire to escape structures and to push boundaries--familial,
social, cultural, and artistic. In her personal life as well as
in her work, Glaspell sought to transcend convention; as she matured,
she actively resisted the conforming pressures of organized religion,
political conservatism, and other social norms. As a young woman,
for example, she stopped attending church with her family, and
instead chose to participate in the meetings of the Monist Society--an
organization that promoted discussions of socialism, Nietzschean
philosophy, evolutionary theory, and human sexuality, among other
advanced topics. At the same time, however, Glaspell strove to
understand traditions, especially those of her pioneer ancestors
who had settled in Davenport, Iowa. Her work reflects truthfully
and poignantly the pull many in her generation felt between their
love for and duty to family and its older values and their desire
to embrace this new, progressive ideology for themselves and the
nation.
In the first third of the biography, Ben-Zvi
details the key departures from the traditional midwestern woman's
life that Glaspell's story epitomizes: college education at Drake
University and graduate course work at the University of Chicago;
an early stint as a society columnist for the local Davenport
newspaper, the Weekly Outlook, and a first full-time
post after graduation as a court and state house reporter for
the Des Moines Daily News; a decision soon thereafter
to commit to a full-time creative writing career, which brought
Glaspell early and consistent success nationally and internationally;
travels in Europe and residence in the bohemian Latin Quarter
in Paris; and a relationship with a married man, George Cram ("Jig")
Cook, who became her husband in 1913 following his divorce from
his second wife. In narrating these events, Ben-Zvi establishes
both a foundational feminist understanding of Glaspell's life
and work and an essential comparative framework through which
her readers can understand the groundbreaking nature of Glaspell's
choices.
Ben-Zvi, for example, juxtaposes Glaspell
with the Davenport doyenne of "local color" fiction, Alice French
(a.k.a. Octave Thanet), whose stories and novels championed the
older, conservative values of the region. And Ben-Zvi also compares
Glaspell with another Iowa contemporary, Hamlin Garland, whose
writings reflected an equally polarizing idealization of poverty
and labor. Ben-Zvi highlights the important distinctions among
these three authors to reveal the complexities in style, characterization,
and content of Glaspell's work. Ben-Zvi establishes the basis
for considering Glaspell among the emerging American modernists--artists
committed to the truthful (but not necessarily realistic) representation
of social and political issues, to an honest exploration of national
culture and identity, and to experimentation with the forms and
styles that could best convey these concerns. Moreover, Ben-Zvi
links Glaspell's formative years in Iowa with an immersion in
American culture (especially the writings of Emerson) and early
introduction to the "Chicago style" of journalism and fiction.
Ben-Zvi similarly sees Glaspell's sojourn in Paris and exposure
to Maeterlinck as instrumental to her later emergence as a dramatist.
One of the problems facing any Glaspell
biographer is the comparatively modest amount of genuinely self-revelatory
information she left behind. As Ben-Zvi and others have noted
(most pertinently, Glaspell's previous biographers, Marcia Noe
and Barbara Ozieblo), Glaspell did not keep lengthy journals or
diaries, and although she retained letters received from friends,
lovers, and colleagues, her correspondents generally did not keep
hers. Like other Glaspell scholars, then, Ben-Zvi has relied heavily
on The Road to the Temple (Glaspell's biography of Cook,
who died unexpectedly in Greece in 1924) for background details
of their relationship and entwined careers. Ben-Zvi has also recently
published a new edition of this work and has argued persuasively
for its importance as a key text in Glaspell's oeuvre--not only
as a biography of Cook but also a source of critical insights
on their common midwestern backgrounds, on American arts, politics,
and culture, and on issues of gender, class, and national identity
in the early twentieth century. Ben-Zvi combed all the relevant
archives--in Iowa, New York City, Cape Cod, and elsewhere--for
material to confirm the accuracy of, and to fill the gaps in,
Glaspell's narrative. As an O'Neill scholar, Ben-Zvi already had
a formidable background in much of the theater history and dramatic
criticism of the period, which she augmented with readings of
autobiographies, critical studies, and history of the era to provide
a fuller and more balanced account of individuals and events.
The memoirs of Mabel Dodge and Floyd Dell, for example, presented
Ben-Zvi with vivid images of Greenwich Village and Provincetown
life from which she could draw. In deploying these sources, Ben-Zvi
provides some important correctives to both earlier Glaspell studies
and other works on the period, especially those that took The
Road to the Temple as comprehensive and factual. (Glaspell
slighted the early phases of her relationship with Cook and glossed
over his writer's block, alcoholism, and adultery.) For scholars
familiar with these figures and their era, there may be some disappointment
that Ben-Zvi did not discover a hidden trove of new information,
but for the general reader her book offers an accessible and engaging
entrée to their world.
Because the story of Glaspell--especially
her work in the theater--is so intertwined with that of Cook,
Ben-Zvi's biography can be read as both homage to and critique
of Robert K. Sarlós's groundbreaking study Jig Cook and the
Provincetown Players (1982). The works cover similar ground,
but Ben-Zvi provides new and distinct perspectives on the individuals
and events connected with the legendary company. She represents
more fully the interconnected lives and careers of many of the
Players, as well as their ties to leftist politics and feminism.
Equally important, she adjusts the historical record to foreground
the significant contributions of Glaspell and other women to the
success of the Players (a topic also explored in Cheryl Black's
The Women of Provincetown 1915-1922). Ben-Zvi, along
with other Glaspell scholars, also offers important correctives
and supplements to O'Neill studies by demonstrating conclusively
his indebtedness to both Glaspell's innovative experiments in
expressionist dramaturgy and her editorial expertise as an early
reader of his work. These observations strongly challenge assumptions
that Glaspell must have imitated O'Neill and that O'Neill's was
a solitary creative process. They enrich and diversify our understanding
of early 20th-century American theater history, previously focused
so heavily on this one male playwright.
Glaspell's work as a dramatist and Ben-Zvi's
discussion of her plays, understandably, occupy the center of
the biography. Because Glaspell's playwriting lies at the chronological
mid-point of her career and has been perceived as her more adventurous
work stylistically and topically, Ben-Zvi devotes a full third
of the biography to the brief but exciting period of 1914-1922.
This section covers the founding of the Provincetown Players and
the composition of Glaspell's eleven plays produced by the group.
It closes with the couple's departure for Greece, which turns
out to be the end of their affiliation with the company and of
its role as the leading developer of modernist American theater.
In this section especially, Ben-Zvi's commitment to enhancing
our knowledge of Glaspell and her writing merits note; even for
a text so over-examined as Trifles she provides new insights
and fresh readings. In discussing this canonical piece, based
on a murder case Glaspell covered in 1900-01 as a young reporter,
Ben-Zvi reminds us of the impact the fifteen intervening years
would have had on the author. She reads the play through Glaspell's
lived experience as a woman in U.S. culture since the turn of
the century, calling attention to the suffrage movement and changing
attitudes toward women's roles in public and private spheres and
thus explicating the historical and critical contexts of Glaspell's
characters, dialogue, and plot.
Because Glaspell's early fiction and dramaturgy,
the relationship of Glaspell and Cook, and the story of the Players
have received comparatively more critical attention, the last
third of Ben-Zvi's biography may prove the most revelatory, even
for readers familiar with the general arc of Glaspell's life and
career. While some scholars posit a decline in Glaspell's importance
and innovation as a writer following Cook's death, Ben-Zvi argues
convincingly for a thorough re-consideration of this period of
Glaspell's career, which includes the composition of not only
her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Alison's House, but
also her most commercially successful novels (which are discussed
at greater length in Martha Carpentier's The Major Novels
of Susan Glaspell). Precisely because of the dismissal and
neglect of Glaspell's later writing (especially Alison's House,
which the New York critics reviled when it received the Pulitzer),
Ben-Zvi's thoughtful discussion of these works and the circumstances
of their composition allows for a much fuller understanding of
the final phase of Glaspell's creativity.
Ben-Zvi also covers in detail here Glaspell's
relationships with two considerably younger men, Norman Matson
and Langston Moffett--unconventional intimacies for the time,
even within her circle. Clearly, these later affairs had nowhere
near the impact on her work that her friendship and marriage with
Cook did (Ben-Zvi believes that Glaspell's is the dominant voice
in The Comic Artist, co-written with Matson). Yet they
do demonstrate Glaspell's continued resistance to social conventions
in matters of love. (Glaspell hinted that, for the sake of her
family, and perhaps also to safeguard her publishing career, she
let others assume she and Matson had wed.) The biography also
frankly discusses Glaspell's struggles with alcohol and depression;
unlike Glaspell's almost hagiographic portrait of Cook, Ben-Zvi
balances her admiration for Glaspell with the necessary objectivity
to present the life and work truthfully and fairly.
Ben-Zvi's deep engagement with Glaspell's
texts, career, friendships, loves, and beliefs complements her
portrait of a woman experiencing some of the most eventful periods
of recent U.S. history. These include two world wars and the progressive
era, with its transition from agrarian to industrial society and
its accompanying changes in the lives of women and families, as
well as the crash, the great depression, and the New Deal's promise
of renewed economic stability for all. History has taught us about
all these events from certain well-established perspectives, but
Ben-Zvi's biography offers glimpses of these moments as points
of intersection with the life of a woman artist, refracted also
through her fiction and drama. Glaspell's writing thus emerges
as history as well--chronicles of life in the conservative American
heartland, in the bohemian communities of Greenwich Village and
Provincetown, and in a post-war nation grappling with competing
ideologies for its future.
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