|
Susan Glaspell devoted much of her life to the theater. Educated at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she worked for a time as a newspaper reporter and drew on her experiences as a journalist in her short stories, novels, and plays. She was a cofounder of the Provincetown Players, who performed many of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s one-act plays and who performed her own one-act play Trifles. She acted and directed; she wrote a dozen plays; and she won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931. As head of the Chicago bureau of a federal theater project, she reviewed hundreds of plays and helped in the production of important works by black playwrights. Although she did much of her work in the East, she said, "Almost everything I write has its roots in the Middle West; I suppose because my own are there." She was a spiritual descendant of her pioneer ancestors who left "comfortable homes for unknown places." Many of her characters struggle against "fixity and stagnation," trying to move, as their pioneer forebears did, "into a new sphere, if not of place then of spirit" (Enoch Brater).
Glaspell’s work was rediscovered by feminist critics who found in her lays a "woman’s version" of events, created at a time when the theater was heavily dominated by male dramatists. Like her British contemporary Virginia Woolf, she has become an inspiration to women whose goal is "control over their own bodies and a voice with which to speak about it" (Susan Rubin Suleiman).
Although her play Trifles involves violent death, it is not a drama of violence or of physical action. Instead, the plot focuses on the unraveling of motives and on the loyalties of the survivors. As in Greek tragedy, we witness none of the violent events directly—we merely hear about them. The real drama is in what goes on in the minds of the characters as they react to the events—as they think through their responsibilities, bring their memories to bear, come to understand what happened, and take sides.
Web Destinations
-
Susan Glaspell (1882–1948)
- This site features links to a variety of resources on Glaspell as well as the texts of some of her work.
-
-
-
-
-
|
