Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1994 Public and private space in Alison's House: the culture of the early twentieth century and the plays of Susan Glaspell Kimberly Ann Miller Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at:https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of theEnglish Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Miller, Kimberly Ann, "Public and private space in Alison's House: the culture of the early twentieth century and the plays of Susan Glaspell" (1994).Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 16135. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/16135 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. 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Public and private space in Alison sHouse: The culture of the early twentieth century and the plays of Susan Glaspell by Kimberly Ann Miller A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department: English Major: English (Literature) Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 1994 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW AND CRITICAL APPROACH 1 Introduction 1 Critical Background 3 Critical Approach 14 CHAPTER 2 EMILY DICKINSON IN ALISON'S HOUSE 17 The End of the Emily Dickinson's Century 17 Alison's House Plot Summary 26 Dickinson's Life Translated to the Stage 32 CHAPTER 3 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACE OF THE 1930'S 38 Early Twentieth Century Culture and the Theatre 38 Public and Private in the Plays of Susan Glaspell 42 REFERENCES 51 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I think part of the educational value of a project like this is in realizing the support required to finish it. While I cannot list the names of everyone who inquired about the progress of my work, I certainly could not have completed this thesis without the assistance and guidance of the following people. First, I would like to thank the Iowa State Department of Residence Life for use of facilities and resources. The Buchanan Hall Staff, headed by Cha Ron Sattler and Sharon Weigel, provided support as well as several -reality checks" along the way. I shall always be grateful. I would also like to thank Dr. Nina Miller for allowing me to attend her seminar, "Literary Modernism: 1915-1930," during Spring Semester, 1994. Her seminar led me to several sources about this time period and her discussions about the development of mass culture assisted me in attempting to look at Glaspell's plays in a new light. The three members of my Program of Study Committee, Dr. Mary Helen Dunlop, Gregg Henry, and Dr. Susan Carlson, have greatly shaped my educational experience as well as my thesis. Dr. Mary Helen Dunlop guided my research abilities while developing my interest in cultural studies. Gregg Henry generously provided me the opportunity of working as a dramaturg with the staff of the Iowa State University Theatre Department. From this experience I have learned of the educational value of the theatre and that there are countless ways a script can be produced to provide meaning for an audience. It is to Dr. Susan Carlson that lowe my greatest appreciation. Dr. Carlson provided me with the initial opportunity of studying Alison's House and assisted my understanding of women in theatre which helped me to develop this project. Most of all, I thank Dr. Carlson for her enthusiasm towards Glaspell research, which assisted me during those moments when my own project seemed to be moving slowly. I believe it will be the standards of this committee, and these individuals, that I shall keep in mind each time I undertake a new project. Finally, I wish to thank my parents for their support over the years that led to this project. It is a small expression of gratitude for such a large deed. 1 CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW AND CRITICAL APPROACH Introduction The year 1915 saw the formation of a theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts. "Without money, without any known playwrights, without an audience, or a favorable critical attitude, but with an ideal it would not sacrifice, that theater did succeed. This happens rarely ...•• (Waterman 65). This group was called the Provincetown Players and the ideal Arthur Waterman refers to is a commitment to supporting American playwrights who produced more experimental fare than the formula offerings that dominated Broadway at that time. This smaller and less commercial theatre would provoke thought as well as provide entertainment. Susan Glaspell and her husband, George ·Jig· Cram Cook, both originally from the Midwest, were among the founding members of the Provincetown theatre and became two of the leading figures of Bohemian life. The radical and unprecedented work of the Provincetown Players was not an altogether uncommon blossom to emerge from the socially conservative roots Glaspell (and Cook) had received growing up in Davenport, Iowa. Pioneers themselves, Glaspell's family had been among the first to settle the area of Davenport, near the Mississippi River. The act and art of pioneering, according to C.W.E. Bigsby, Linda Ben-Zvi, and others, became an important theme in Glaspell's work. Late in her life, Glaspell admitted, "'1 live by the sea, but the body of water I have the most feeling for is the Mississippi River ...' . (Noe 13). So it's not surprising that while Glaspell pioneered the beginnings of the Provincetown Players and American experimental theatre in a fish house on the Lewis Wharf, facing the Atlantic Ocean, the setting of the stage inside was often the Midwest and the characters on that stage were pushing the boundaries society had ordained. Glaspell wrote for the Provincetown Players since the group's earliest beginnings,' but she was already an established writer by this time. Before she 1 Glaspell's first play was written with Jig Cook in 1914 and was performed in a neighbor's living room. The play was called "Suppressed Desires" and spoofed the growing interest in psychoanalysis, and it was enacted again during the Provincetown's first season. 2 had married Cook in 1913, she had published two novels, The Glory of the Conquered (1909) and The Visioning (1911), and a volume of short stories, "Lifted Masks" (1912), while she lived in Davenport where she had grown up. Before becoming a full-time writer, she lived in Des Moines, Iowa, to attend Drake University and complete a Ph.B. and then to work as a newspaper reporter, covering society news and later state politics. Because of her records at Drake there is some question over the year Glaspell was born. It is generally stated as 1882, but as Waterman points out, if she was twenty-one when she attended Drake in 1897, she would have been born in 1876 (Waterman 13). I came to study Glaspell's work because of her presentations of and ties to the Midwest. Having grown up in the Davenport area, I at first was curious about her as a local celebrity of whom I had learned very little. I continued to study Glaspell because she used silence in her characters as a means of articulating their experiences, and in three of her plays, used a character's absence to drive the plot forward. Like other readers before me, I became intrigued by the silences that spoke as clearly as dialogue. Glaspell's final work for the stage, Alison's House, whose absent character is the fictional poet, Alison Stanhope, was awarded the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. During my study it became clear that while many critics will praise, or at least commend, Glaspell's earlier works for the stage,2 Alison's House was not widely accepted by the theatre critics of 1930. J. Brooks Atkinson called it lithe most unsatisfactory dramatic award made during the past few years" ("Pulitzer- VIII:1). Likewise, the scholars studying Glaspell now remain reluctant to give as much attention to the prize-winning work as they do to the works of the Provincetown period. Further study gave birth to a larger controversy. While many scholars, as I shall soon discuss, tie Glaspell's work to her life and connect her early plays to the radical climate of the 1910's, Alison's House does not receive the same cultural critique. It has often been noted that the character of Minnie Wright from Glaspell's first Provincetown one-act, -Trifles,· reflects woman's isolation in rural 2 The other two plays with an absent character are Bernice and ·Trifles.· Bernice is about family and friends who gather to mourn the death of the title character, a relatively young woman who was full of life and inspiration. Conversation in the play reveals to her best friend that while Bernice actually died of an illness, she staged her death to look like a suicide because of her husband's extra-marital affairs. Believing for the first time that he had been important to his wife, causing her to commit suicide, Bernice's husband resolves to live a better life. I will discuss "Trifles· in Chapter 3. 3 life of the time and Claire of The Verge, a full-length Provincetown work, depicts the tragedy that occurs when women are not allowed to choose their own destinies. Both were themes important to women's suffrage movement of the time. But Alison's self-imposed seclusion in Alison's House is considered to be an indication of problems in Glaspell's personal life, not a reflection of the time in which she wrote. It is as if Glaspell's connection with history stopped with the death of Jig Cook in 1924 and Glaspell was to remain in the climate of the "new," the world of the American 1910's and early 1920's. Much time and energy has been spent demonstrating why this is a poor Glaspell play instead of researching possible influences that may have led to any changes in Glaspell's style or interests. Here is where my study begins. J will attempt to fill the cultural or historical potholes left in the discussion of Alison's House by looking at social and theatrical changes between 1915 and 1930. I will first review the major criticism surrounding Susan Glaspell and Alison's House and outline some of the discrepancies I discovered the current conversation. My second chapter will look at the assumed and possible sources for the play and Glaspell's adaptation of them to the stage. Finally in my third chapter I will look at changing themes in three of Glaspell's representative plays and parallel them to the society and the development of realism in American theatre during this period. My goal is to determine if Glaspell was influenced by more than her own life and to what extent American society did playa part in the writing of Alison's House. Critical Background Susan Glaspell's name has appeared in critical work almost annually since she began writing, yet many times all that is written is her name, a brief mention on the way to a discussion of the Provincetown Players or Eugene O'Neill, Provincetown's most celebrated playwright. But the last thirty years have seen an increased interest in Glaspell as a writer of her own merit and the most critical investigations have been conducted in the last twelve years. Alison's House can lay claim to only a small segment of this criticism. The much-anthologized "TriflesH and The Verge have received more attention, and I will be reviewing works which represent this trend in some depth to indicate 4 differences in critical approaches to the Provincetown works and Alison's House. Three headings help me to organize the material I will cover: theatre history, biographical/historical criticism and feminist criticism. I have divided the articles and books according to the context in which they were written, if it could be determined, and by the author's stated intent for studying and writing about Glaspel1.3 As will soon become apparent, there are a few authors whose work would fit into more than one section. Theatre history I have gained additional appreciation for Susan Glaspell's plays and see a greater role for Alison's House than I had first considered after reading Brenda Murphy's arguments in her book, American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940. In this "study of literary realism as it evolved in American drama" (ix) Murphy's purpose is to discover a theatrical definition of realism, based on the plays themselves, and to trace any influence the earlier realists of the nineteenth century may have had on the playwrights working between World Wars I and II. Glaspell's plays, "Trifles," "The Outside," Bernice, The Inheritors, and The Verge are discussed, mainly as plot summaries, to support Murphy's definition of realism. I wish to take her discussion one step further in Chapter 3 and add Alison's House to the list of realistic plays. This may not be as simple to do as it would at first seem because Alison's House does not easily fit any theatrical definition, except its classification as a Pulitzer Prize play. In this role, the play has found an entrance into the critical arena. There is a body of scholars who are interested in the view of the theatre through the Pulitzer Prize plays. One of the most recent authors is Thomas P. Adler who maintains that "the Pulitzer plays provide a far more reliable accounting of the nature and development of serious American drama than the equivalent novels do of classic American fiction" (x). He studied winners from the years 1918 to 1985 "to understand [the prize's] dominant focus" (xij). Alison's House, with its hopeful acceptance of a daughter who brought disgrace 3 The most recent book published on Susan Glaspell is Mary E. Papke's Susan G/aspell. A Research and Production Sourcebook. While it does not provide any interpretation of Glaspell's work. the annotated bibliography of criticism about Glaspell has been a useful tool in preparing to research the critical works. I would like to emphasize that I base my discussion of the critical background on my own readings and research. I have relied on Papke's summaries only when I have been unable to secure the source myseH and note this in my discussion. 5 on the family and its gift of poetry to the coming century, comes under the topic of liThe Idea of Progress," but on the whole, Adler remains unimpressed by GlaspeWs work and believes it would have been stronger as a one-act play. Perhaps what is most valuable to me from Adler's study is his observation that Alison's House is noteworthy ... [because] so many of the subjects pursued in the Pulitzer plays over the decades here converge: the new woman whose values are a beacon for the future; the artist as quasi-mystical singer for society; and the tempering of harsh paternalism through compassion, often learned from the child. Adler 134 The value of embodying so many themes, perhaps too many themes, has yet to be discussed. Judith Louise Stephens studied the women in Pulitzer plays awarded between 1918 and 1949 for her dissertation from Kent State in 1977. Basing her reading on several personal qualities,4 Stephens was able to conclude that as the years progressed, female characters were more likely to be dependent on others, concerned mostly with their homes and families, and less likely to have the protagonist role (Chinoy 249). Stephens shows that the absence of strong female characters in the 1930's was not a characteristic of GlaspeWs writing alone, but a trend that held through 1949.5 The study of the next scholar, Judith Olauson, provides more information on why this may have been so. Most likely because of the Pulitzer Prize status of Alison's House, Glaspell was included in Olauson's study of American women playwrights writing between 1930 and 1970. Olauson's intent is to discover if female playwrights defined their female characters through a male or traditional standard or through their own experiences (Olauson 21). She refers to Alison's House as a "traditional historical romance"(139) in which the heroine, Elsa, who has run away with a married man, finds censure from society and family but 4 Stephens uses four characteristics (a preoccupation with love, irrationality and emotionality, seHishness or selflessness, and passivity) from fictional heroines and "integrates" them with four aspects for understanding theatrical characters (motivation, deliberation, decision and action). She summarizes her findings according to the decade in which the Pulitzer was won. 5 This will become an important point later on during my discussion of the feminist criticism of Glaspell's work. 6 a kind of acceptance in Alison's poetry which centers on a dominant theme of loneliness. Olauson concludes that while the female playwrights of the 1930'S6 based their heroines on traditional models, they explored the confusion women felt in redefining their role in society. I believe Olauson makes a good point when she reminds her readers that women had recently earned the right to vote (in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment), so female playwrights did not seem to be writing plays in protest for certain rights. .. However, the subsiding of the feminist movement was no indication that the social problems of women had been alleviated, and woman writers at least seemed aware of the unresolved questions which remained for women in American society. Olauson 140 According to Olauson's study, Glaspell, who has been criticized for blunting the edge of her attacks on social injustice in Alison's House, is part of a larger trend resulting from the passage of women's right to vote. The issues had changed since 1915 and Glaspell had changed with them. In directing attention specifically to Susan Glaspell, C.W.E. Bigsby exemplifies the confusion Alison's House has created in criticism. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, a three volume work written by Bigsby, and a collection of Glaspell's plays, edited by Bigsby, stand as proof that he has dedicated no small amount of time writing about Susan GJaspeIJ and American theatre. Volume One of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama 7 covers the years 1900 to 1940 and is dedicated to discussion of the little theatre movement which the Provincetown Players were a part of. I found this an important work because it provided a broad placement of Glaspell in the theatrical world, but because it is so broad, and necessarily so, Bigsby doesn't address cultural movements that also may have played a role in Glaspe/l's work. The theatre, of course, is the primary focus. Glaspell's personal cultural background is discussed in depth in the introduction to Plays 6 Besides Glaspe". Olauson bases her thesis on the work of Rose Franken (Another Language). Zoe Akins (The Old Maid). Clare Booth (The Women ). Rachel Crothers (Susan and God). and Lillian Hellman (The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes). At times Olauson refers to other works by these playwrights to clarify minor points. 7 This is a three volume work and the entire set was published in 1982.