Susan Glaspell's Fiction: Fidelity as American Romance

Abstract

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916) or short story she based on it, Jury of Her Peers (1917), may be found today in almost every anthology introducing college students literature, yet it seems strange that woman who wrote nine novels and over fifty short stories, in addition fourteen plays, is still mainly known, when known at all, for short dramatic work. Feminist critics such as Christine Dymkowski and Linda Ben-Zvi, among others, are in process of resurrecting Glaspell's reputation and establishing that she is one of two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America (Dymkowski 91). But although this is invaluable, attention continues be focused almost solely on Glaspell's drama, exclusion of her novels. Veronica Makowsky's recent study provides first scholarly feminist analysis of Glaspell's entire oeuvre, from her early stories her late novels, but even Makowsky appears agree with standard view, which is in my opinion not sufficiently substantiated, that Glaspell's plays are her greatest work (24). Glaspell's first novel, Glory of Conquered, was published in 1909; her second, The Visioning, in 1911; and her third, Fidelity, in 1915. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, an idealistic, bohemian fellow lowan. They moved New York and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They were both instrumental in creating Provincetown Players and in establishing group in Greenwich Village. Despite fact that she spent most of 1920s plays for Provincetown theater and did not return novel form until 1928 with Brook Evans, Glaspell considered herself writer of and, as she recalled in later autobiographical fragment, began plays because my husband forced me to (Noe 33). Later, after she and Cook had left New York for two-year sojourn in Greece, she confided in letter her mother that the theater always made it hard for me write and now I will have better chance for my own writing (Noe 49). Although her play Alison's House won Pulitzer Prize in 1931, and she served briefly as Midwest director for Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during 1934, she basically settled in Provincetown after Cook's death in Greece in 1924 and returned fiction, producing five more novels: Fugitive's Return (1929), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). Not only did Glaspell regard herself primarily as fiction writer, but she was critically accepted as an American novelist of integrity and importance until mid 1930s. Many of her novels were reviewed, increasingly favorably, in New York Times. Fidelity was praised by New York Times reviewer for its convincing realism, but it was seen be romantic tale; the story of caught in mesh of law; therefore reviewer did not understand second half of novel, where love is entirely abandoned, and found it flawed for that reason (Anon.). Although Percy Hutchison, Times reviewer of Fugitive's Return, found novel uneven, he praised Glaspell as so much of an individual [that] knows in advance that novel from her pen will not be an ordinary book. John Chamberlain praised Brook Evans in 1928 Times review as a masterpiece on small scale, masterpiece because Glaspell has distilled essence from most important and character-revealing moments, and small scale because she has limited her canvas deliberately . . . focus[ing] on purely human values that remain eternal, irrespective of time or place. In 1931 he aptly described Ambrose Holt and Family as tragi-comedy of and noted Glaspell's delicately pervasive humor, which acts as perpetual astringent cutting through sentimentality. In both reviews he discussed Glaspell's idealism in her life and her work, and praised her courage and commitment as writer. …