SUPPRESSED DESIRES AND TICKLESS TIME: AN INTERTEXTUAL CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

Abstract

On or about December, 1910, human character changed. --V. Woolf Within context of her essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Virginia Woolf's frequently quoted observation refers to a change in interpersonal relations, but for us it also evokes theories of human nature, as well as of cosmos, that rocked culture and radically altered way people saw themselves, each other, and their world as nineteenth century turned into twentieth. Historian Stephen Kern describes process as a change in human consciousness: From around 1880 to outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive modes in thinking about and experiencing time and space (1). Kern goes on to list inventions (telephone, cinema, automobile, etc.) that re-formed spatial and temporal orientations and then discusses ways in which cultural production reflected these ways of seeing world: Independent cultural developments such as stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of dimensions of life and thought (1-2). For playwrights Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, everyday life offered many examples of ideas transforming people and culture; such ideas proved intellectually challenging and creatively stimulating for couple as well. Fellow Provincetown Player Hutchins Hapgood described spirit that motivated his contemporaries in this way: Whether in literature, plastic art, labor movement ... we find an instinct to loosen up old forms and traditions, to dynamite baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers can grow (Quoted in Heller 217). Two plays in particular, Suppressed Desires (1914) and Tickless Time (1918), engage this thinking and function chronologically as bookends for corpus of Glaspell and Cook's one-act Provincetown Plays. (1) The culture of their place and time was culture of modernism, governed by what Brazilian scholar Silviano Santiago has termed the aesthetic of new and the aesthetic of rupture. Many of Glaspell's Provincetown plays are informed by these aesthetics, most notably two that she wrote with Cook. This essay will examine Tickless Time as a work that reflects and comments on its intertext, Suppressed Desires. Read against each other, these plays can complicate and deepen our understanding of Glaspell and Cook's critique of modernist impulse to eschew convention and conformity, subvert established aesthetic norms, and attain personal growth and authenticity by embracing scientific and psychological theories. Although they deal with completely different subjects, Suppressed Desires and Tickless Time have much in common. Each play enacts a search for truth, a quest for self-actualization, and an attempt to escape from conformity, all characteristics of early twentieth-century zeitgeist. Each play reflects and gently mocks trendy modernist thinking of Glaspell and Cook's Greenwich Village and Provincetown colleagues. Suppressed Desires is ostensibly about psychoanalysis, a subject that had been a continual theme of conversation and a popular project of self-discovery ever since Sigmund lectured at Clark University in 1909 and Dr. A.A. Brill subsequently gave a series of talks on topic at Mabel Dodge's fashionable Wednesday evening salons. At that time in Greenwich Village, it became chic to undergo psychoanalysis: Mabel Dodge herself and Masses editors Floyd Dell and Max Eastman were among first to be psychoanalyzed. Sherwood Anderson recalls in his memoirs that Freud had been discovered at time and all young intellectuals were busy analyzing each other and everyone they met (243). Anderson remembers Dell lecturing on subject at a party and then psychoanalyzing guests: And now he had begun psyching us. …