Alison's House | The Shaping of the Female Poet Protagonist
In the following essay, Laughlin explores the shaping of the female poet protagonist in Alison’s House, "the ideological tensions at work in this construction" and the parallels in character to the poet Emily Dickinson
One of the acknowledged hallmarks of Susan Glaspell’s dramatic writing is the device of the “absent center,” the structuring of the play around a female character who never appears but whose impact on the present characters and action is powerfully felt. In Alison’s House, Glaspell’s last play and the one that brought her the 1931 Pulitzer Prize, the absent character is Alison Stanhope, a thinly veiled likeness of Emily Dickinson, whose house is being prepared for sale eighteen years after her death. While her presence is evoked in the play’s earliest scenes,...
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