The name Susan Glaspell is followed in her biographical sketches by some of the most illustrious credentials in all of American theater history: cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the seminal American theater company; prodigious playwright, who contributed eleven plays to the Provincetown theater in its seven years of existence, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill, who wrote fourteen under the aegis of the group; talented actress, praised by the visiting French director Jacques Copeau for her moving depiction of character; director of her own plays, including The Verge, one of the first expressionist dramas seen on the American stage; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931 for her play Alison's House, only the second woman to be so honored; head of the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in the thirties, credited with reviewing over six hundred plays and instrumental in the production of several important works by black playwrights; significant influence on others, particularly Eugene O'Neill, who she brought to the Provincetown theater in the summer of 1916 and with whom she continued to have a close personal and professional relationship until her departure for Greece with her husband in 1923, thus ending the original Provincetown experiment.

Few have been so successful in so many areas of theater, yet, ironically, few have so completely disappeared from the dramatic canon as Susan Glaspell. Critics in her own period such as Heywood Broun, Ludwig Lewisohn, Isaac Goldberg, and Barrett Clark praised her and O'Neill for creating an indigenous American dramatic idiom, experimenting with new forms and new subject matter, and leading the way for those who followed. Yet while O'Neill's reputation grew over the years, Glaspell was virtually ignored by subsequent critics. In the forty years following her death, only one book devoted to her dramas and novels and only one biographical essay on her life appeared. And with the exception of her first one-act play, Suppressed Desires, which has remained a standard work for amateur theater companies, her other writings—six oneact and six full-length plays and eleven novels—were allowed to go out of print.

Interest in Glaspell and her work began to resurface only in the last ten years, when research devoted to women writers uncovered her masterpiece Trifles, and the play, along with the short story version, "A Jury of Her Peers," began to appear in anthologies of women's writing, particularly Mary Anne Ferguson's popular Images of Women in Literature and Judith Barlow's drama collection Plays by American Women: The Early Years.

While feminist criticism has brought Glaspell's name back from the dead and uncanonized, it has not yet produced studies of Glaspell's contributions to dramatic writing. Most discussions of her plays concentrate on them as documents of female exploitation and survival. Certainly, they are important because they are among the first modern writings to focus exclusively on female personae, but they go even further. They offer a new structure, a new dramatic language appropriate to their angle of vision, and a new depiction of character which accommodates the experience of the central figure they delineate, a woman seeking her way in a hostile and often unfamiliar world.

Glaspell's relevance to women playwrights is particularly important because she illustrates in the body of her works the kinds of questions they must face, questions of form determined by the sensibility that the plays embody. Glaspell was among the first writers to realize that it was not enough to present women at the center of the stage. If there were to be a radical break with plays of the past, women would have to exist in a world tailored to their persons and speak a language not borrowed from men. She shared this awareness with her contemporary Virginia Woolf, who, in a 1920 essay, described the problems of female representation on the stage:

It is true that women afford ground for much speculation and are frequently represented; but it is becoming daily more evident that lady Macbeth, Cordelia, Clarissa, Dora, Diana, Helen, and the rest are by no means what they pretend to be. Some are plainly men in disguise; others represent what men would like to be, or are conscious of not being; or again they embody the dissatisfaction and despair which afflict most people when they reflect upon the sorry condition of the human race.

Glaspell's women are what they seem to be: tentative and often halting, trying to find themselves and their voices. Her explorations on the stage are similar to those described by the critic Susan Rubin Suleiman in her 1986 essay entitled "(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism":

Women, who for centuries had been the objects of male theorizing, male desires, male fears and male representations, had to discover and reappropriate themselves as subjects.… The call went out to invent both a new poetics and a new politics, based on women's reclaiming what had always been theirs but had been usurped from them; control over their bodies and a voice with which to speak about it.

Glaspell, seventy years earlier, was aware of both responsibilities. She offered a form, a poetics, and a politics which Suleiman and others writing today describe as vital to female-centered art. Glaspell saw that if the world portrayed is the world of women—if the locus of perception is female—then her plays would have to strive for a shape which reinforces this new vantage point and a language which articulates it. And while her particular experiments may at first glance seem removed from those of women writing in modern and postmodern modes of the sixties, seventies, and eighties—who employ transformations, nonrepresentational situations and characters, fragmented temporal and spatial distinctions—they are in fact part of the same ongoing search for dramatic means to depict female experience. A study of Glaspell's works thus provides illustrations of how women can function as protagonists and how structures, language, and subject matter can act as extensions of such women-centered drama.

When Susan Glaspell first came to New York with her husband George Cram Cook in April 1913, she was disturbed by the theater she saw. In The Road to the Temple, her biography of Cook, she writes, "Plays, like magazine stories, were patterned. They might be pretty good within themselves, seldom did they open out to—where it surprised or thrilled your spirit to follow. They did not ask much of you, those plays." Like O'Neill and the other contributors to the Provincetown Players, she was conscious of the limitations of traditional dramatic form. The Dublin-based Abbéy Theatre had toured America in 1911 and had shown the possibilities of dramas not limited to narrowly defined shapes. Yet Glaspell's desire to smash existing structures stems from more than the contemporary abhorrence of limitation, permeating the society in which she moved: Greenwich Village in the first decades of the century. To understand Glaspell's work with form and language, it is necessary to understand something of her biography. Her wish to see plays which "open out" and require the audience "to follow" springs most directly from her pioneer roots.

Susan Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1876, a grandchild of one of the early settlers of the territory. When asked to compile notes for a biographical sketch, she wrote, "Though my home has for some years been in the East, almost everything I write has its roots in the middle west; I suppose because my own are there." In an essay for Twentieth Century Authors she repeats this idea: "I have never lost the feeling that is my part of the country."

The impetus for pioneers such as her ancestors, that thing that made them leave comfortable homes for unknown places, continually puzzled Glaspell and became the central motif in all her writing. In The Road to the Temple she asks, "What makes a man who has an orchard or a mill in Massachusetts or New York where there is room enough for him … get into a covered wagon and go to Indians, rattlesnakes, to the back-breaking work of turning wilderness into productive land." "They go to loneliness and the fears born in loneliness," she says of these pioneers. Young enough herself to remember her grandmother's stories, Glaspell also recognized the difficulty facing the following generations. How do those who come after retain the pioneering spirit? In Inberitors, her historical drama, the protagonist Madeline Morton says to her college professor Dr. Holden, "Just a little way back—anything might have been. What happened?" He answers (speaking with difficulty), "It got—set too soon." Unlike O'Neill, who attributed America's failure to an inability of the country to "set down roots," Glaspell saw roots as dangers, marks of fixity and stagnation, usually leading to stultifying institutions against which her characters struggle, much as their pioneering forebears did, in order to move into a new sphere, if not of place then of spirit.

While Glaspell indicates that both men and women need constantly to question institutions and to change them and themselves if both become too rigid—a situation she describes in Inheritors—it is to her women characters that she usually attributes this desire for change. It is they who seem to suffer most from the fixity of society. Glaspell continually sunders the stereotype of women desiring stability and the comfort of place. Her works stand in juxtaposition to arguments such as the one set forth in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, where women are depicted as perpetuators of the status quo, those agents of society against whom male characters battle by going down the Mississippi, into the wilderness, on the road. Invariably in the world Glaspell describes, it is the women, not the men, who want to "lit out," for fixity impinges more directly on them than on the men. As figures of power—American versions of Ibsen's "pillars of society"—the male characters in Glaspell's works have most to lose by change, they hew most closely to routine, and allow virtually no freedom to the women with whom they live. Glaspell's women, for the most part, are required to uphold traditional patterns and remain in place—both physically and mentally.

Mrs. Peters in Trifles is typical of such personae. She is described as "married to the law," and expected as such to mouth the ideas of her husband, the sheriff, to trace his conservative path, reflecting his opinions and his decisions. Mr. Peters and the men in the play are untouched and unchanged by the events they witness at the scene of a murder; they are "the law," and the law, Glaspell indicates, is a fixed thing incapable of dealing with either nuances of a case or variations of human behavior. Mrs. Peters, however, assimilates the evidence she stumbles across; she "opens out" into new areas of self-awareness. It is her emancipation which becomes the central theme of the play, overshadowing the murder investigation, the ostensible subject of Trifles.

In The Verge, Glaspell's expressionist masterpiece, her protagonist Claire Archer experiments with plants in an attempt to move vicariously in new directions that have not been attempted before. Her "Edge Vine" timidly clings to the familiar patterns of the species, and she destroys it. It is to the plant she calls "Breath of Life" that she next turns, hoping that in its courageous "thrusting forward into new forms" it will enter worlds which she too wishes to know. When asked why she breeds new plant forms that do not seem "better" than the familiar varieties, she attempts to explain: "These plants (beginning flounderingly.)—perhaps they are less beautiful—less sound—than the plants from which they diverged. But they have found—otherness. (Laughs a little shrilly.) If you know what I mean?" When her husband tries to stop her words as he has tried to stop her experiments, she continues excitedly, "No; I'm going on. They have been shocked out of what they were—into something they were not; they've broken from the forms in which they found themselves." In Claire's own life, "form" takes the familiar configurations: wife, mother, friend, lover. She too would move outward, but she is kept back by a circle of men appropriately called Tom, Dick, Harry—friend, lover, husband—and by her sister and child. "Out there—lies all that's not been touched—lies life that waits. Back here—the old pattern, done again, again and again. So long done it doesn't even know itself for a pattern," Claire says to those who thwart her in her desires.

In Inheritors, again woman is shown as pioneer, this time not seeking emancipation from conventional gender roles or attempting exploration into unknown areas, but seeking the reinstatement of democratic values which have been subverted in succeeding generations. Madeline Morton, the protagonist, refuses to believe that the practices of America in 1920, with its Red-baiting, condemnation and imprisonment of conscientious objectors, and limitations on freedom of speech, are correct. An "inheritor" of the pioneering spirit of her grandfather, she alone questions the values of the "100 percent Americans" whose jingoism reflects the period in which the play is set and in which it was written.

The image of pioneering is a recurrent one in all of Glaspell's plays; it shapes all her writing. Yet what makes her significant as a model for modern women playwrights is less the paradigm itself than the fact that Glaspell creates a form which reinforces it. Like modern playwrights such as Beckett and Pinter, she recognizes that it is not enough to have subject matter discuss new ideas; a playwright must also offer a dramatic form appropriate to the ideas expressed. The impossibility of logic and linearity cannot be adequately shown in a conventional three-act play which abides by the laws of time and place; so, too, the desire of women characters to break the rules of their societies cannot be depicted in plays which follow conventional rules. The form of a Glaspell work becomes an extension of the theme: each play attempts to break with the formulaic conventions of dramaturgy so pervasive during her period and to offer possible new structures to shape the explorations of her female personae.

Nothing in a Glaspell play is linear. Plots do not have clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends; they self-consciously move out from some familiar pattern, calling attention as they go to the fact that the expected convention will be violated, the anticipated order will be sundered. If the play seems to be a traditional detective story, as in Trifles, the emissaries of the law—the men—will not be the focus of attention. The center of interest, instead, will be the women, those peripheral, shadowy figures in the play who have come on the scene to accompany their husbands and each other.

The notion of linearity in Glaspell's plays is always connected with suppression and with social institutions which have become rigid and confining. For example, the men in Trifles walk and talk in straight lines, crisscrossing the scene of the murder as they crisscross the facts of the murder case. When Mr. Hale, a witness to the murder scene, relates his story, he is chided by the district attorney to recount just the facts. "Well Mr. Hale, tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning." Whenever Mr. Hale veers in the slightest way from the straight narrative line, the county attorney returns him to the narrow parameters of the discourse. "Let's talk about that later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but tell now just what happened when you got to the house." In his insistence on the limitations of discourse, the attorney makes clear that he is able to proceed only in prescribed ways. It is significant that Mr. Hale is not part of the legal system; he seems less confined by the narrowness of the lawmen and more in spirit with the freer, unstructured methods of the women, one of whom is his wife. Yet because of his sex, Mr. Hale is afforded the privileges of the men. He is not confined to the kitchen, but follows the attorney and the sheriff around the house seeking clues which will help convict Mrs. Wright, the woman accused of strangling her husband.

Unlike the men, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters show flexibility in their actions and their words. They are limited by the patriarchal power structure clearly working within the scene Glaspell describes, but they are free in the limited confines of the kitchen where the play takes place. One of Glaspell's radical departures is to place the action in the kitchen, one of the few plays of the period to follow Miss Julie in doing so. But unlike in Strindberg's play, there are no men in this female province to control the action. Here the women freely retrace the steps of Mrs. Wright. Slowly, almost without volition, they piece together the motive for murder, quilting a pattern of awareness as they randomly move across the stage and speak about the events of the case.

The central image Glaspell chooses for this play is quilting, and, like quilters, her female characters carefully sew together disconnected pieces, making new patterns out of old materials, intuitively sifting through the details around them without any preconceived pattern limiting their actions. It is they who solve the case, not the lawmen who are committed to set ways of investigation.

The dichotomy Glaspell presents is between male fixity—the fixity of a society gone rigid—and female exploration at the outskirts of that society in the world of women, among "trifles." She underlines this dichotomy by offering a form which has the same randomness and openness as the quilting process itself, in apposition to the constrained, formalized actions of her male characters.

Even more innovative is Glaspell's manipulation of point of view. What she is able to do in this play and in her other works is to force the audience to share the world of her women, to become fellow travelers with her pioneering protagonists. While the men in Trifles are almost immediately shunted offstage and only appear as they traverse the playing area of the kitchen, the women remain stationary. It is with them that the audience—men and women—remain, not privy to the conversations of the men, not afforded their mobility. The audience is therefore forced to see the world through the eyes of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. As a bond is gradually forged between the women and the absent one for whom they act as surrogates and judges, a bond is gradually created between the women and the audience who has gained some insights into their female world and has—at least for the duration of the play—seen as they see. When, at the end of the work, Mrs. Hale places the box containing the strangled bird into her pocketbook in order to destroy the incriminating evidence which provides the only motive for murder, the audience generally applauds her gesture and by so doing becomes itself an accessory to the act.

By placing women at the center of the drama and the audience captive in the kitchen with them, Glaspell does more than merely upend the conventional detective format or offer an unusual locale for a play—at least in 1917. She actually overturns the very hierarchical values of the society she depicts. The men in the play chide "the ladies" for being concerned with the "trifles" of the farm kitchen: the unbaked bread, dirty towel rack, and sewing left undone. Yet Glaspell indicates during the course of the play that such "trifles" can reveal truths, that the concerns of women may have as much significance as the "facts" of men.

She overturns both conventional dramatic form and conventional gender demarcations and values in her other plays as well. In The Outside men again play the seemingly active agents. They are lifesavers who attempt to resuscitate a drowning victim. And again—as in Trifles—men are unsuccessful; their attempts to save life fail. But as they go through the motions of resuscitation, two women—a maid and her employer—watch silently and themselves perform another kind of "lifesaving." As in Trifles, once more Glaspell depicts the inarticulate power of women to understand the shared experiences of other women, unstructured by language but nevertheless communicated through mutually shared pain. Using single words, pauses, and broken sentences, the maid, Allie Mayo, reaches out to the other woman, Mrs. Patrick, drawing her back to the life she has rejected. Little outward action occurs, but once more Glaspell indicates that events of great moment may take place in near-silence among those not accustomed to heroic deeds; individuals may be saved by a few well-chosen words, by a gesture, by "trifles," as well as by physical valor.

In The Verge Glaspell's protagonist is less fortunate than the two women in Trifles and The Outside; she is afforded no victory in her quest for freedom. Unable to move "outside," like the plant she has cultivated, Claire Archer reverts to one of the two traditional ends for women who would break with societal restrictions. She lapses into madness, a variation on the suicide that so often is the end of pioneering women, at least in literature in the early part of twentieth century. Glaspell's great accomplishment in this play is to provide a perfect dramatic structure to shape her hero's efforts. Antedating O'Neill's Hairy Ape by several months, she creates one of the first expressionist settings in American theater. The play has an odd, open-ended shape to it, depicted visually on the stage by the two playing areas: the narrow, low greenhouse in which Claire works and the tower—"a tower which is thought to be round but does not complete the circle," the stage directions say. Claire calls it her "thwarted tower." Both areas are lit in special ways. In act 1, patterns are superimposed on the greenhouse "as if—as Plato would have it—the patterns inherent in abstract nature and behind all life had come out." Periodically, light from a trapdoor illuminates the laboratory. The interior of the tower in act 2 is dark and brooding, lit by an old-fashioned watchman's lantern whose "innumerable pricks and slits in the metal create a marvelous pattern on the curved wall—like some masonry that hasn't been."

The form of the play is also experimental. Beginning like a conventional comedy of the twenties—weekend guests discomforted because the heat in the house has been diverted to the plants in the greenhouse—the play moves in act 2 to a psychological investigation of Claire that stands in odd juxtaposition to the levity and ambiance of act 1. Yet this discontinuity between acts seems to be Glaspell's way of once more having form reinforce theme. Repeatedly in act 1 Claire is chided by the men around her to be "cheerful," "witty," "fun." Enforced gaiety is what Claire wishes to escape as much as she wishes to escape the restrictive roles of traditional womanhood. By contrasting the style and mood of the laboratory scene with the introspective world of the tower, Glaspell indicates the forces working on her protagonist. Only in her tower home is Claire relatively free to pursue a course not dictated by others. However, there are still stairs which lead up to her haven, more often trod than the parallel stairs which lead from her laboratory down to a temporary, subterranean refuge. She may escape down the latter, but she cannot avoid the intrusions of those who will ascend the former.

In act 3, again in Claire's laboratory, as she waits for the unveiling of her new plant form, the tensions between the two styles of the preceding acts and the two venues explode in violence. Using the same ending that O'Neill will employ in The Hairy Ape—the hug of death—Glaspell has her protagonist strangle Tom, the man who presents the greatest obstacle to her freedom. She then concludes her play with Claire lapsing into insanity, what appears to be the only refuge from the world depicted in the play. Conflating the initial comedy of manners and the psychological investigation, Glaspell creates a play which fits no simple category, a fitting structure for a protagonist who wishes to escape easy classification.

Glaspell's plays foreground women and provide open, unrestricted, asymmetrical dramatic structures in which women operate. The same can be said for the language characters use. Repeatedly, Glaspell connects language to action. Since her women are exploring new areas of their lives, they find traditional language unsuited to their needs. They may be women unused to speech or women all too aware that the words they speak do not express their thoughts. In either case the results are the same. Her characters are virtually inarticulate, or are rendered so because of the situations in which they find themselves. The most common punctuation mark she uses is the dash. It is used when the character is unsure of the direction in which she is going, as yet unprepared to articulate consciously a new awareness or unwilling to put into words feelings and wishes which may collapse under the weight of words.

One of Glaspell's most important contributions to drama is to place these inarticulate characters in the center of her works, to allow them to struggle to say what they are not sure they even know. While O'Neill's personae usually end statements with exclamation points, Glaspell has the courage to allow her women to trail off their words in pauses, devices against the tyranny of language. And while those inarticulates O'Neill does present are unable to speak because of the limits of their class or education, Glaspell's women, despite their class, share the limitations of their gender and find speech difficult. It fails to describe the new areas into which they are attempting to move and is often perceived as the language of male experience.

In many ways Glaspell's recognition of the inherent connection between female independence and language makes her a forerunner of contemporary feminist critics who see language at the heart of any possible realignment of the sexes. While Glaspell did not write essays about the subject, her plays speak to the same concerns that occupy feminist critics such as Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. And while Glaspell's struggles to create a female language do not go as far as those espousing ecriture fe'minine would probably accept, they are predicated on some of the same beliefs: that women's subjugation in society is connected to the subjugation imposed by language.

Prefiguring psychoanalytic critics such as Irigaray, Glaspell actually offers on the stage the absent woman—woman as void—against whom male characters react, upon whom they impose a shape—much as Woolf described—making of the absent woman a kind of palimpsest upon which to inscribe their own identities, desires, and language. Bernice in the play of that name, Alison in Alison's House, and Mrs. Wright in Trifles are all hovering presences who never appear. Since they are not physically present, their voices are co-opted by males who speak for them. This dramatic depiction of woman as void is one of Glaspell's most innovative and modern techniques, employed by contemporary women playwrights as well as by feminist critics.

One of the most direct examples of male usurpation of female speech appears in Trifles, which begins with Mr. Hale acting as the spokesperson for the absent Mrs. Wright. Her words come through his mouth. The women present say nothing as the voice of man speaks the words of woman. Only when the women are alone does sound come, and it is—and remains—a halting sound. Yet as the awareness of their shared subjugation develops, the women begin to seek a verbal form for this knowledge. Appropriately, it is a language of stops and starts, with lacunae—dashes-—covering the truths they still cannot admit or are unused to framing in words. What the audience sees and hears are people learning to speak, constructing a medium of expression as they go. The way is not easy, and the language they frame is awkward. But it is clearly their language, no longer the words of others which they have been taught to speak.

One of the most effective moments in the play, a point of anagnorisis, is when Mrs. Peters recalls the time when she too felt powerless, like Mrs. Wright, and she too had murder in her heart: "When I was a girl—my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—and before I could get there—if they hadn't held me back I would have—hurt him." Unwilling or unable to say more, Mrs. Peters talks in half sentences, covering her growing awareness in pauses more telling than the words she actually employs. The sentence becomes a verbal concomitant to the patchwork investigation the two women have conducted in the kitchen.

In another section of Trifles, Glaspell points directly to the connections between quilting and growing awareness, doing so through seemingly flat, banal phrases. Three times during the course of the play, the women discuss the stitches Mrs. Wright has used for her work. The first time the men overhear them and laugh when Mrs. Hale asks, "I wonder if she was goin' to quilt it or just knot it." Several minutes later the question turns to a qualified statement when Mrs. Peters says, "We think she was going to—knot it." The last words of the play, after the women have hidden the evidence and silently rebelled against their husbands, are Mrs. Hale's: "We call it knot it." From interrogative to qualified statement to assertion—the sentences mark the changes in the women, changes the men overlook because they do not hear the import of the words the women use. To the men, the words refer to "trifles"; the language is foreign, the shape of the sentences irrelevant. That seems to be Glaspell's point. The women speak in a different voice, to use Carol Gilligan's apt phrase. There is the voice of law and fact and the voice of connection and caring. The two voices do not hear each other. What is important, however, is that the audience, who has begun to decipher the words of women, can understand the import of the lines as the men with whom these women live cannot. The audience has begun to listen to, if not to speak in, "a different voice."

Glaspell employs other alterations of language in The Verge. In that play Claire Archer suffers from too many words, other people's words. When she desires to express her own ideas, she finds herself unable to do so because the words she must use are already misshapen by the uses others make of them. "I'm tired of what you do," Claire tells her fatuous sister,

you and all of you. Life—experience—values—calm—sensitive words which raise their heads as indications. And you pull them up—to decorate your stagnant little minds—and think that makes you—And because you have pulled that word from the life that grew it you won't let one who's honest, and aware, and troubled, try to reach through to—what she doesn't know is there.

Unsure of what she seeks, Claire realizes the dilemma she faces: the language which is her only means of investigation is the language of those she would leave behind. It is against the fixed forms of the society which Claire inveighs, just as it is against the imposition of an alien language which she struggles.

To compound the problem, Claire also recognizes that when trying to give voice to ideas which are still inchoate, she forces upon them a pattern that limits the exploration itself. "Stop doing that!" she demands of language, "—words going into patterns; They do it sometimes when I let come what's there. Thoughts take pattern—then the pattern is the thing." Here Glaspell refers not to the limits women experience speaking the language of men but to the limits of language itself.

Claire Archer is one of the first female characters in drama whose main concern is to create a new language and whose failure illustrates the difficulties in doing so. Sixty years later, in his play Not I, Samuel Beckett would place a gaping mouth eight feet above the stage and reenact a similar struggle for articulation of self—and a similar failure. By making language the primary focus of the struggle for selfhood, Glaspell is radically expanding the possibilities of thematic material for theater and the uses of stage language.

Further, Glaspell was one of the first women playwrights to present female personae engaged in violent acts: killing a husband offstage in Trifes, strangling a lover onstage in The Verge. Glaspell's choice of subject matter in both plays may not seem shocking or innovative in the contemporary period, where a playwright depicts a woman taking the grotesque shape of a circus freak and having her genitals excised (Joan Shenkar's Signs of Life); or examines lesbianism, homosexuality, and masturbation as liberating alternatives to, or perhaps direct results of, colonial values and mores (Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine); or describes the ritual slaughter of a random male (Maureen Duffy's Rites); or depicts lady mud wrestlers performing in a bar in New Jersey (Rosalyn Drexler's Delicate Feelings); or makes Joan of Arc and Susan B. Anthony fellow travelers (Lavonne Mueller's Little Victories). Yet, in her own period, Glaspell's material was culled from events and subjects considered sacrosanct, controversial, and—in the case of Inheritors—subversive. Her first play was Suppressed Desires, written in collaboration with her husband, George Cram Cook. It parodied a movement which her own circle of friends in Greenwich Village took most seriously: psychoanalysis. "You could not go out to buy a bun without hearing of someone's complex," Glaspell wrote about her first days in New York in 1913. Blind adherence to analysis becomes the comic subject of the play, subtitled A Freudian Comedy. It was one of the first plays written in America to employ, albeit sarcastically, the new theories Freud introduced to the country only a few years before in his Clark University lectures.

GlaspelI consistently wrote about controversial topics throughout her career, sometimes treating them to ridicule, sometimes offering them a platform for development. For example, her last play for the Provincetown theater, Chains of Dew (1922), has as its protagonist a young woman named Nora (the name probably borrowed from Ibsen) whose mission is to spread news about contraception and who in the process radicalizes the women with whom she comes into contact in the play and, by extension, those in the audience.

Glaspell's most challenging use of subject matter, however, comes in the play Inheritors. In order to appreciate the risks taken in this work, it is necessary to have some idea of the climate in which the play was written in 1920. In 1917, as a result of Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war—an act Glaspell and her friends vigorously opposed—Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which required general conscription for eligible males, exempting only those who on narrowly specified grounds opposed all wars. Others resisting the draft for moral or political reasons were tried as deserters, and when convicted often faced brutal treatment. Along with conscription, Congress also enacted laws intended to quell dissent about the war. The Espionage Act, on pain of a ten-thousand-dollar fine and twenty years in jail, made it illegal to refuse duty or impede recruitment in the military. The appended Sedition Act went further and prohibited uttering, printing, or writing any disloyal, profane, or scurrilous language about the form of government in the United States. Various alien laws made it a crime, punishable by deportation, to speak out against America or any of its allies.

During the postwar period the theater was generally silent about such abuses in society. Burns Mantle's Best Plays of 1920-21 lists such hits as Good Times and Irene. Glaspell's Inheritors was the exception to this escapist fare. It directly condemns the treatment of conscientious objectors after the war, the deportation of aliens and strikebreakers, and the abridgment of personal freedom of speech. The play also makes direct references to the excessive patriotism which persisted after the end of the war. "That's the worst of a war—you have to go on hearing about it for so long," and "Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men," and "The war was a godsend to people who were in danger of getting on to themselves" were lines still liable to bring Glaspell—like her protagonist—a possible fine and jail sentence under the espionage and sedition laws. Glaspell's friends Big Bill Haywood, head of the Wobblies, Emma Goldman, and Jack Reed had already experienced the effects of the repression. Yet Glaspell went ahead with her play, which was well received and may have had some part in reversing the climate of the period. It is interesting to note that as a mark of the universality of the issues Glaspell raises, the Hedgerow Theatre of Moylan, Pennsylvania, headed by Jasper Deeter, an original member of the Provincetown Players, performed the play every year from 1923 to 1954, except during the war. When the play was revived by the Mirror Repertory Company in New York in 1983, the critics all mentioned one point: the picture of the past which it offers is as valid in the eighties as it was for Glaspell's audience in 1921.

Glaspell's focus on contemporary issues—either to mock them or to promulgate them—follows a tradition among women playwrights which goes back as far as Mercy Otis Warren and forward to Megan Terry and Maria Irene Fornes. Yet when Terry wrote Viet Rock in the sixties and Fornes wrote The Danube and The Conduct of Life in the eighties, they risked far less censure or danger than Glaspell faced in her own stand against a repressive society.

As important as her political positions were in keeping alive the tradition of outspoken women playwrights, Glaspell is probably most important to women writers as an example of someone who dared to give dramatic shape to the struggles of women. The two women in Trifles can be prototypes of Everywoman; Claire Archer can be a fictional surrogate for feminist ideologues who are presently engaged in altering language to fit their own needs and possibilities. Certainly, Glaspell is not the only woman playwright who provides a her/story from which others may draw sustenance. Those writers represented in Barlow's collection—Mowatt, Crothers, Gale, and Treadwell—as well as innovators such as Gerstenberg and those many, until recently anonymous black women play-wrights of the twenties and thirties, offer a body of works that open up the range of experimentation for the present group of women playwrights.

I would argue that having read the work of Glaspell and other women writing at the beginning of the century, one has a better idea of the ongoing movement which is American women's drama. There is the shadow of Glaspell and the others behind such experiments as the Women's Project of the American Place Theatre, which one of its participants described as giving to women "a place to raise their voices without apology." While Helene Keyssar in Feminist Theatre is correct in saying that it was only in the late sixties that playwrights "in significant numbers became self-consciously concerned about the presence—or absence—of women as women on stage" (my italics), there were women much earlier in the century, and before, who shared these concerns and wrote plays which led the way. Susan Glaspell was one of the most important of these pioneering playwrights. Although she has been ignored by those who shape the canon, she should not be ignored by those who are attempting to reconstitute it.

Linda Ben-Zvi, "Susan Glaspell's Contributions to Contemporary Women Playwrights," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1989, pp. 147-66.