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.