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Geopathology in Susan Glaspell's Theatre

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Geopathology in Susan Glaspell's Theatre FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL STAGING THE POWER OF PLACE: GEOPATHOLOGY IN SUSAN GLASPELL’S THEATRE NOELIA HERNANDO REAL DIRIGIDA POR: DRA. DÑA. Mª ANTONIA RODRÍGUEZ GAGO 2007 UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL STAGING THE POWER OF PLACE: GEOPATHOLOGY IN SUSAN GLASPELL’S THEATRE TESIS PRESENTADA POR NOELIA HERNANDO REAL PARA LA OBTENCIÓN DEL GRADO DE “DOCTOR EUROPEUS.” DIRIGIDA POR LA DRA. DÑA. Mª ANTONIA RODRÍGUEZ GAGO, PROFESORA TITULAR DE UNIVERSIDAD: Vº Bº MADRID 2007 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to many people and institutions that throughout the years provided me with support, time and funds to work on this thesis. I am indebted to Mª Antonia Rodríguez Gago, for her personal and intellectual support and guidance during the research and writing of this thesis. I wish to thank especially Barbara Ozieblo, for sharing her enthusiasm, commitment and Glaspell’s material with me. I am also indebted to other members of the Susan Glaspell Society for their inspiring conversations on Glaspell, especially Martha Carpentier, Cheryl Black, Linda Ben-Zvi, Sharon Friedman and Drew Eisenhauer. And to Sherry Engle, for her contagious energy and for offering me a home in New York City. I would like to thank María Barrio Luis for reading early drafts of this thesis, and Christopher Tew for his attentive proof- reading. My research could not have been possible without the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Education, FPU Program, which granted me a four-year research scholarship. The Spanish Ministry of Education also sponsored a travel grant to Trinity College Dublin, where thanks to Prof. Anna McMullan I had access to all the facilities and joined for a couple of months the thought-provoking postgraduate seminar of the School of Drama. I am also thankful to the Research Projects of the Department of English, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, “Voices and Images of the New Millennium: Multiculturalism and Gender in Contemporary Anglo-American and Canadian Literatures” (PB98- Dirección General de Ciencia y Tecnología) and “Refiguring the Body: Reinventions of Transnational Identities in Contemporary British, North American and Canadian Theatre and Fiction” (HUM 2004- 00515), both directed by Dr. M ª Antonia Rodríguez Gago. These projects supported financially my research trips to New York and to several conferences, which contributed enormously to the development of this thesis. This research took me to many libraries, and the present work could not have possible without the help I received along the way. I am particularly grateful to the librarians of the Biblioteca de Humanidades of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Teresa Domingo and Mabel Redondo, whose efforts to provide me with the multiple interlibrary loans I asked them for almost always found a positive answer. Special thanks also to Stephen Crook and Philip Militto, librarians of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and to the librarians of the British Library and the Theatre Museum Library, Blythe House Archive in London. Last but not least, thanks to all those who provided personal support and encouragement, especially my family, my friends and Felix, who probably know more about Susan Glaspell than they could have ever imagined. Madrid, 2007 “We know a small place in a vast unknown. We cherish our small place, for it is all we have of safety, all that is ours of opportunity. But the sense of all the rest is there, sometimes as a loneliness, always an excitement.” (Susan Glaspell, Fugitive’s Return) “A setting is not just a beautiful thing, a collection of beautiful things. It is a presence, a mood, a warm wind fanning the drama to flame. It echoes, it enhances, it animates. It is an expectancy, a foreboding, a tension. It says nothing, but it gives everything” (Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination). “ There’s no place like home!” (Lyman Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz) CONTENTS Introduction i Chapter 1. The Stage Space in the American Theatre of the Early 20th Century 1 Chapter 2. Towards Geopathology in Susan Glaspell’s Modern Drama 31 Chapter 3. American Geomythologies Revisited as Part of Dramatic Geopathology 77 3.1 The American Myth of Mobility 77 3.2 The Trope of Invasion in Dramatic Geopathology 93 3.2.1 Displaced Characters, Invasion, and Victimage of Location 93 3.2.2 Invasion in the Politics of Location 102 3.3 Punishment and the Myth of Mobility 106 3.4 Racism and the Myth of Mobility 108 3.4.1 Immigrant Characters as Victims of Location 108 3.4.2 African American and Native American Characters and the Myth of Mobility 117 3.5 Geopathic Disorders 123 Chapter 4. Geodichotomies in the Configuration of Dramatic Geopathology 129 4.1 Geographical Isolation in the Face of the Community 129 4.2 Dramatic Representations of Home as Prison and Shelter 137 4.2.1 Dramatic Configuration of Home as Prison 138 4.2.1.1 Unlocalized Offstage Prisons in the Study of Dramatic Geopathology 138 4.2.1.2 Metaphors of Entrapment in the Dramatic Configuration of Home 142 4.2.2 Metaphorical Representations of Home as Shelter 159 4.3 Dramatic Geodichotomy between Inside and Outside 178 Chapter 5. The Burden of the Past in Dramatic Geopathology 197 5.1 Dramatic Re-negotiations with the Pioneer Heritage 199 5.2 The Spatial Burden of the Pilgrim Fathers’ Heritage 209 5.3 Geopathic Crossroads: Place, Identity, and Tradition in Performative Acts 216 5.4 Tradition vs. Modernity: Generation Conflicts Reflected Onstage 223 Chapter 6. Imagery of Death in Dramatic Geopathology 241 6.1 Dramatic Representations of Home as Grave 241 6.2 The Buried Child 249 6.3 Places of War 263 6.4 Haunted Rooms: The Absent Character’s Contribution to Victimage of Location 284 Chapter 7. Dramatic Principles of Departure 305 7.1 Physical Departure from Fictional Locations 307 7.2 Making Others Depart 314 7.3 Subversions of Power Geometry 322 7.4 Reshaping Home Physically 330 7.5 Departure through Art 343 7.6 Departure through Nature 349 7.7 Departure through Solving the Generation Conflict 359 Conclusions 367 Documentación en español [Documentation in Spanish] Resumen [Summary in Spanish] 377 Introducción [Introduction in Spanish] 385 Conclusiones [Conclusions in Spanish] 397 Appendix. 1. Chart of Analysis of Dramatic Victimage of Location in Susan Glaspell’s Plays 405 2. Chart of Analysis of Dramatic Principles of Departure in Susan Glaspell’s Plays 415 Bibliography Index 421 Bibliography 423 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Susan Glaspell’s appeal is first to the mind, and when she reaches the heart she does so completely and in a way not to be lightly forgotten by those who have yielded to its power. (Royde-Smith 1926: 25) Susan Glaspell (1876- 1948), who today is still timidly acknowledged as the mother of modern America drama, was once “the great American thinker in dramatic form. She is the spirit and the mind and the soul of the real America of to-day, expressed in literature” (Rohe 1921: 18). Her plays were usually compared to master playwrights, such as Chekhov, Ibsen, Maeterlinck or Shaw.1 Indeed, her sole work was enough for a critic to justify the existence of the Provincetown Players, the little theatre group that revolutionized the American stage in the second decade of the 20th century: “If the Provincetown Players had done nothing more than to give us the delicately humorous and sensitive plays of Susan Glaspell, they would have amply justified their existence” (Corbin 1919: np). But it was not only her plays that gave sense to the existence of the Provincetown Players, for Glaspell also constituted a galvanizing force behind the great writers of the group, such as Eugene O’Neill. An early friend of Glaspell described her as “my first heroine in the flesh, a glamorous presence of poetry and romance who fired one’s imagination and made all glorious things seem possible. Her personality was a flame in the life of the student body, or at any rate in the group that felt themselves the social and literary leaders” (Fowler 1928: np). Fortunately, and although a lot of work is still to be done to relocate Glaspell for good in the place in American theatre she once occupied but was banished from,2 theatre scholars recognise her merit, even if only for her acclaimed one-act Trifles (1916). Some of her plays, Trifles, The Outside, Inheritors and The Verge, were 1 See for instance Corbin 1919: np for a comparison of Glaspell to Maeterlinck, Hedges 1923: 393 for Glaspell’s work contribution to the United States similar to that of Ibsen to Norway, “Tchehov and Susan Glaspell” 1929: np, for a comparison of Glaspell to Chekhov, and Edwin Björkman for Glaspell’s appraisal as “an American Shaw” (1920: 518). 2 It must be noted that Glaspell won a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for Alison’s House, a prize that she did not only receive for this play, but for her theatre career. i published in an anthology C. W. E. Bigsby edited in 1987,3 and which certainly encouraged critical works on Glaspell. But as Linda Ben-Zvi has asserted, after Glaspell’s resuscitation in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the groundbreaking works of Annette Kolodny (1986) and Judith Fetterley (1986), “Glaspell’s criticism has moved to a second stage – assessing the work of this important writer, no longer arguing her case” (1995a: 131). Recently, several works have appeared with the aim of assessing the work of Susan Glaspell from different perspectives.
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