For over ten years, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) has accompanied me through most of my waking hours; I have read her plays, novels, and letters again and again, trying to understand why the rebel in her chose so often to acquiesce to convention. Sigmund Freud--whose theories of the unconscious supplied Glaspell with the topic of her first play--unguardedly affirmed in his brief biography of Leonardo da Vinci that "biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way."[1] I admit that I have been fixated, but I hope I have successfully avoided the trap that Harold Nicholson, Leon Edel, and Andrą Maurois, among other great biographers, have warned against by refusing to write a thinly disguised autobiography. But I have not shied away from cultivating what Kathleen Barry, biographer of Susan B. Anthony, has termed a "dialectical relationship," whereby a dialogical interaction is established between the subject and her biographer; in this way, I have been able to acknowledge Glaspell's voice without losing my own, while avoiding "the objectification of the other."[2]
The history of American drama has tended to relegate Susan Glaspell, when it has deigned to acknowledge her at all, to the status of wife of George Cram Cook, founder of the Provincetown Players, the amateur theatrical group that discovered Eugene O'Neill. Only recently have academics and theater lovers begun to recognize her name and anthologies found space for her play Trifles (later rewritten as the short story "A Jury of Her Peers"). But Glaspell is the author of more than one play: she wrote five short plays and five full-length dramas and cowrote two short plays with her husband and one full-length piece with her lover, Norman Matson. By the time she married Cook in 1913, she was an acclaimed short story writer and had published two novels. After Cook's death in 1924, she turned back to the novel, vying, on different occasions, with Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway for the top position on the best-seller list. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison's House in 1931.
But Glaspell's roster of achievements does not end there. As I have tried to show in this book and in the introduction to the 1994 collection of Provincetown plays I edited, Glaspell's part in the success of the Provincetown Players should not be seen as limited to her wifely duties. The Players could always rely on her for a new play when they needed one; in fact, as she was leaving for Greece in 1922, she handed over Chains of Dew, a play she had written with an eye on Broadway that was not wholly suitable for the little theater on Macdougal Street. Her play Trifles was the Players' first success, although it was never performed in their New York theater. Staged on the Provincetown Wharf in the summer of 1916, it was bought out by the Washington Square Players, who then claimed the honor of introducing Glaspell to New York theatergoers. Although theatrical history has rightly credited the Provincetown Players with the discovery of Eugene O'Neill, it has preferred to gloss over Glaspell's vital intervention: it was she who convinced the Players--after O'Neill had already succeeded in antagonizing them--to give him another chance and sit through a reading of Bound East for Cardiff. Once she had maneuvered him into her magic circle of amateur thespians, she continued to support and encourage him, as she did other young writers whom she took under her wing.
Susan Glaspell was largely responsible for introducing the American theater to British audiences: The Verge was performed by Edith Craig's Pioneer Players at the Regent Theatre, starring Sybil Thorndike as Claire. It had received mixed reviews in New York, but the British critic James Agate placed it on a par with Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, recognizing, moreover, that "the American writer made her case more difficult by applying it to the whole human race, whereas the Norwegian confined it to the individual."[3] Glaspell's other plays were staged by prestigious avant-garde institutions such as the Cambridge Festival Theatre, the Liverpool Repertory Company, and the Gate Theatre. Ellis Roberts of the Guardian declared Glaspell "the greatest playwright we have had writing in English since Mr. Shaw began," and Time and Tide compared her role in the development of the American theater to that of Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory's in the Irish theater.[4]
On her return from Greece after Cook's death, Glaspell hoped to continue working for the Provincetown Players to keep alive the memory of her husband. She found, however, that Cook was a genius and a saint only in her eyes and that her part in the launching of the Players and O'Neill's career had been quietly suppressed. But not everyone had forgotten her, and in the late 1930s, the Federal Theatre laid claim to Glaspell's enthusiasm and vision, placing her in charge of the Midwest Play Bureau.
But in spite of living an extraordinary life for a woman of her time and her undoubted triumphs and popularity as a playwright and novelist, Glaspell constantly ceded center stage to the men she loved, making it extremely difficult to reconstruct either her life or her personality. Joining the ranks of many famous writers, Glaspell destroyed her personal letters; her extant diaries, held by the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, are mostly empty, a few pages half-filled with cryptic sentences to remind her of ideas for plays or stories. The biographer must rely on the traces of her life that she could not destroy, such as her plays and novels, and the letters and autobiographies of friends, in which she is but a minor character in the drama of their lives. And then there is Glaspell's The Road to the Temple, the biography she wrote of her husband, in which she transformed herself into his handmaiden, erasing herself altogether.
But a biographer's task, as Virginia Woolf insisted, is precisely to capture the personality of her subject; Susan Glaspell existed and, postmodernisms notwithstanding, she had an identity and played a part in the development of the American theater. So, taking Woolf's lessons to heart, I struggled never to lose sight of the integrity of facts and to manipulate them only "in order that the light of personality shine through" as I worked to weld what Woolf audaciously considered the "granite-like solidity" of facts to the "rainbow-like intangibility" of personality.[5]
Some of the facts of Susan Glaspell's life are documented in various sources, and The Road to the Temple does not belie them. Eventually, though, the plodding detective work of gathering facts had to give way to the impossible, quite devilish task of interpretation. With no help from Glaspell, except the elusive dialogue that I have done my best to establish between us, I approached the more intimate aspects of her life, the personality that Leon Edel enjoins the biographer to penetrate.[6] I scoured "the evidence in the reverse of the tapestry" and concluded that the key characters in the drama of her life included a possessive mother who soothed her own frustrated ambitions with her daughter's triumphs, an ineffectual though deeply loving father, an exalted husband ever intent on transforming the world, and a callous lover who abandoned her. In different ways, these people leavened her ambition to transcend the patriarchal limitations imposed on women. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Glaspell inched toward perfection, always aware of and frequently questioning the pain involved in "overcoming man."[7]
"The Rules of the Institution" (1914), a story Glaspell wrote after she defied society by taking Cook from his second wife, examines the dilemma any sensitive, intelligent, middle-class woman of the period confronted when she left insouciant girlhood behind. She could slip into the place society had prepared for her and acquiesce to tea parties, charity work, and marriage, or if she had tremendous willpower and drive, she could create a life of her own. Glaspell shows just how difficult it was for women to rebel: "One settled down into the feeling that one couldn't do any differently and wrested a certain mournful satisfaction from the sadness of surrender."[8] The protagonist of "The Rules of the Institution," a college graduate, slowly sinks into the apathy of small-town life, thus creating a prototype for Sinclair Lewis's Main Street; when she does rebel, it is the society matrons who protest most vociferously. The patriarchal coat of mail imprisoning women is so subtly riveted that they no longer know they are trapped, and moreover, with blind complacency, they consider it their duty to ensure that the fine links enmesh their daughters as tightly, and as quickly, as possible.
All of her life, Glaspell struggled against this self-perpetuating order "that held life in chains"; her sensitive nature opened her to an acute awareness that the links were often forged with "affection and obligation," but, urged on by a tenacious optimism, she never stopped grappling with them.[9] Her fiction is full of young women who inflict sorrow on those who love them in order to grasp what they understand as the fullness of life. In "The Rules of the Institution," the goal is unspecified; in other works, it is education, experience, or professional success, but frequently the Glaspellian woman, still not quite free of patriarchy's dictates, sacrifices the peace of mind of others--and her own self--to an illusory love.
Glaspell's friend Lawrence Langner (who had refused to cast Cook in the first Washington Square Players production and thus spurred him to found the rival Provincetown Players) captured the effects of her internal struggle to reconcile duty and the need for self-fulfillment in The Magic Curtain, his autobiography. Describing the Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemians of 1915, he wrote: "Then there was Susan Glaspell, a delicate woman with sad eyes and a sweet smile who seemed as fragile as old lace, until you talked with her and glimpsed the steel lining beneath the tender surface."[10] The dichotomy of duty and desire, Victorian submission and modern self-assertion, molded Glaspell's features as much as her person and characterized her writing, lending it the ambivalence Langner detected that can prove both unsatisfactory and disconcerting for today's readers. Like so many professional women, particularly those brought up in strict religious families toward the end of the nineteenth century, Glaspell attempted to combine a career with filial duty and love for a man. Unfortunately, the men she chose were not as talented as she was, but her maternal, self-sacrificing instincts, sharpened by her Victorian upbringing, drove her to raise their accomplishments above her own.
Although Glaspell insisted that her life and achievements were uninteresting compared with those of her husband, I have taken the liberty of representing her as the primary and sustaining member of their partnership. Our ongoing dialogue led me to exchanges that heightened my understanding of her position, and so I present the reader with my version of one of the "six or seven thousand selves"--posited by Virginia Woolf in every human being--awaiting us in Susan Glaspell.[11]