Glaspell, Susan - Barbara Ozieblo (essay date 1990)
Barbara Ozieblo (essay date 1990)
[In the essay below, Ozieblo argues that Glaspell's female characters reveal her personal ambivalence about the role of women in society, oscillating between rebellion against and dependence on men.]
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) is a prime example of the "peculiar eclipsing" so frequently suffered by women writers. She devoted eight years to the Provincetown Players, and her plays alone would have justified the claim that the sand dunes of Provincetown were the birthplace of modern American drama. But Glaspell's voice was silenced, and although feminist literary criticism has rediscovered some of her work, she is still largely unknown. Experimental in form and content, her plays brought expressionism and social criticism to the American stage, and her contribution on this count is so significant that it cannot be treated adequately in a short essay. Here I have set a less ambitious goal: by focusing on those facets of...
[The entire page is 4408 words long]
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