I. “Thinking with/out History”
In a comparative study of the conflicting attitudes of the culture of the nineteenth-century and of the twentieth-century towards history, the historian Carl E. Schorske asserted:
The nineteenth-century “historicism in culture” ― its way of “thinking
Modernist ahistoricism took diverse forms, from haughty elitism distanced from the culture of the masses to egotism to insistence on the autonomy of art. Most importantly, in representing the chaos of modern life and history the most celebrated modernist writers appropriated myths. T. S. Eliot proclaimed in “
The reduction of modern history to some antiquated myths, which Eliot glorified as “the discoveries of an Einstein,” an artistic equivalent of a modern scientific breakthrough, exposes a disconcertingly contradictory side of modernist projects. Because male modernists’ turn to the primordial narratives of civilization for a new literary form to capture the essence of modernity and modern history sabotages the view of history as a future-oriented project hinged on temporal progress and development. Such a circulative notion of history is fundamentally a sign of historical conservatism. The liberal vanguardism in their preoccupation with the invention of new literary forms ― Ezra Pound’s often-cited obsession was with “form, not the form of anything,” his famous mantra “make it new” ― was in contradiction with their reactionary ahistoricism. Predictably, regardless of their formal innovation, their conservative ahistorical cultural politics turned into right-wing political affiliations with the fascist orders installed by Hitler and Mussolini in the cases of Pound and Eliot.
The oxymoronic hybrid of formal innovation and historical conservatism in Modernism meets its theatre version in New York’s Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the American bohemian avant-garde culture in the early twentieth-century: the playwright Susan Glaspell’s husband, who was often nicknamed “Jig,” George Cram Cook (1873-1924) was an ultimate Grecophile who founded the Provincetown Players, a monumental amateur ‘little theatre’ that served as midwife to the birth of American dramatic modernism by staging plays of such celebrated indigenous playwrights as Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill, after the Dionysian theatre he worshipped. His commitment to realizing the collaborative ideal of the ancient Greek drama through his own theatre community shares a certain kinship with the whole modernist project of patterning the present after the mythic and primitive. For him, theatre was fundamentally a group effort to claim back the spiritual energy of its original primitive collectivism. Glaspell records him verbalizing this faith in
Cook’s vision was of a quasi-tribal art drawing spiritual unity from diverse individuals who could freely move across the boundaries of acting, writing, and producing plays. A group of social revolutionaries and writers who gathered around Cook and Glaspell to inaugurate the Provincetown Players in the summer of 1915 were “the talented elite of that epoch’s counterculture” with “a more conscious desire to lead their own lives and
As playwright, Cook made his aesthetic commitment to Modernism overt although his talent seems to have consisted more in rallying and inspiring people around his projects than writing. Besides his Eliotian “classicism” of modeling a theatre on the Dionysian theatre of ancient Greece, his plays ― often met with lukewarm to poor receptions by critics and audience, with the exceptions of some short-length collaborations with Glaspell such as
Another dramatic innovator bonded by marriage to the charismatic director made her own modernist contribution, which has often been treated as subsidiary to the achievement of O’Neill, a Nobel laureate and more preferred darling of theatre historians. A playwright of greater artistic caliber and discipline than Cook whose historical significance today has shrunk to his role as founder of the Provincetown Players, Glaspell (1876-1948) was the most creative and productive playwright representing the group along with O’Neill, providing eleven plays during her seven-year collaboration with them through the teens and twenties including the critically acclaimed one-act
A modernist as well as feminist who challenged male authority and patriarchal norms in writing, Glaspell remained in a rather traditional role when it came to her personal relationship. She was a member of Heterodoxy, the New York-based feminist organization “for unorthodox women” (Schwartz 1), but according to a witness she had “that talent for making men feel appreciated, something they needed, and may not have gotten elsewhere” (Ben-Zvi,
A disparity in the tenors of Glaspell and Cook’s modernist projects seems inevitable due to the hierarchical gender relation underneath the “companionate” façade of their marriage. It is most conspicuously displayed in their conflicting historical perspectives which look deeply ingrained and old. As a twenty-year-old columnist of the
The couple’s contrasting historical outlooks manifest themselves in their plays. Their collaborative short comedy
2While her public statement was “when in 1915 my husband organized the Provincetown Players I became interested in writing for the theatre,” she corrected it in an unpublished note: “I began writing plays because . . . Cook ‘forced me to’ . . . . I didn’t want my marriage to break up so I wrote ‘Trifles’ [sic]” (Larabee 97-98). 3One of the earliest Glaspell scholars, Waterman stated that “there is no question . . . that Susan Glaspell’s importance to our literature derives primarily from her dramatic achievement” (119).
II. Cook’s Ahistorical “Classicism” -- Tickless Time
Cook’s temporal consciousness as modernist who “loved all things that record time” (Glaspell,
But Eloise’s conversion to his unfamiliar system involves a rather painful ritual of burying all the clocks and watches at home into the “graves” dug behind the sun-dial:
Despite her eventual, rather blind conversion to Ian’s scheme, Eloise is not without qualms about it. For example, finding his relentless death verdict on her cherished cuckoo clock too extreme, she protests, “I like to hear the ticking of a clock,” for “this was a wedding present” from her friends (82). This male-female dynamic of the one pushing his idea and the other pressed and patronized to embrace it, or the one dumping a wedding present ― a symbol of blissful marriage ― without a second thought and the other trying to salvage it, remains a jarring backdrop behind the buoyant mood of the whole comedy. When their friends ― the couple Eddy, “a Standardized Mind,” and Alice, “a Standardized Wife” (80) ― arrive, Eloise, persuaded by Ian, begins to parrot his praise of the sun-dial. She declares she is done with clocks, the “approximations arbitrarily and falsely imposed upon us” and “the lies we inherited” that now “lie buried there” (85) in the graves.
Ian’s idiosyncratic notion of time delivered to the “standardized” crowds evokes the proud elitism discovered in modernists, who posited themselves as visionary individuals in battle with the collective bourgeois culture.4 While the culture of machines such as alarm clocks is generally considered a symptom of modernity, it falls prey to the cultural battle of modernists insofar as it serves cultural collectivism. This is the nature of a cultural battle waged by Ian, whose break with clocks means a break with the collective as well as mechanical modern culture. By contrast, Eddy, “a Standardized Mind,” as his character is defined so, says he prefers the collective wisdom of humanity to “ideal time” proposed by Ian, for he believes that “the ticking of a clock means the minds of many men” (88). Gathering some elitist arrogance from Ian’s insistence on solar time with its benefit of “a first-hand relation with truth,” Eddy and Alice throw quite “standardized” questions to him and his follower Eloise: “How are you going to connect up with other people?”; “Do you mean to say that you are going to insist on being right when other people are wrong?” (86)
Comic relief emerges when the sun-dial is found to have some critical defects. These issues are partially and rather vaguely raised early in the play in a dialogue between Eloise and her neighbor Mrs. Stubbs, when they talk about a confusing dinner schedule in case they should count on the sun-dial. They receive a fuller exposure later: the sun-dial is twenty minutes ahead of the standard Eastern time, and what is worse, it “only tells the right sun-time four days in the year” (87). Eloise is astounded at the math needed by adding or subtracting minutes for the adjustment of one time plan to the other. To make matters worse, after several frantic trips back and forth between the kitchen and the sun-dial to time the cooking of dinner, Annie, the cook, calls it quits, packing her suitcase for want of any clock to consult. The alarm-clock is hurriedly dug up from the grave to avoid the practical problem of losing a cook. Ending all the fuss is Mrs. Stubbs who enacts the role of a much needed
What is missing in the scanty volume of scholarly comments on
Also needing to be supplemented to the problematic gender roles in the play, which I see as reflecting a gender hierarchy in Glaspell and Cook’s own marriage as well as in the cultural politics of Modernism, are the clashing perspectives between a male visionary and the female characters over the “tick” of the clock, the aural unit of time and, by extension, of history. Eloise objects to Ian’s burial of “the clock [which] my grandmother started housekeeping with” (83), but he dismisses this objection saying it is why her grandmother turned into “a meticulous old woman” “with a standardized mind” who “lacked scope” (83). Regardless of Eloise’s preference for or abhorrence of mechanical modernity represented by the clock, it functions here as an innocently symbolic object loaded with the history of her foremother’s domestic labor, her unappreciated sweat at home. Not only is Eloise’s grandmother slandered, but the female characters are mostly handicapped by Ian’s new time project. Their domestic schedules are jumbled, particularly related to cooking. Eloise, Mrs. Stubbs, and the cook Annie all find it too taxing with no clock around to meet their customary mealtime. Eloise thus warns Mrs. Stubbs against offering a cold dinner to her husband if she strictly observed the sun-dial. Hence her ironic advice to this neighbor: “Mrs. Stubbs had better be false and arbitrary too. Mr. Stubbs might rather have his supper than the truth” (84). Eloise lists other inconveniences about the sun-dial as well, but all the practical problems predicted by her, such as failed train schedules, missed dentist appointments, and the late arrival of guests for dinner, are too randomly refuted by Ian:
Naturally attached to the sound of “tick,” and feeling estranged from Ian’s vision of “a first-hand relation with truth” carried out by the sun-dial, Eloise shouts out at one point of the play, although she will succumb to him later: “I need a tick! I am afraid of tickless time!” (83). Ian’s solar project pitted against the tick of the clock that his wife is emotionally attached to appears to be a metaphor about a male genius who is interrupted and challenged by a female partner with more practical and emotional concerns. No wonder it is always the women, Eloise and Mrs. Stubbs, who are subject to Ian’s repeated complaints: “you are in the way of the sun” (81, 84). Hinting at women’s interruptions in his Apollonian project, and degrading, as discussed earlier, their (the grandmother’s) history of domesticity in which the practical management of time -- through the tick of the clock ― mattered much, Ian positions himself as a man with “scope” free of “standardized mind,” the opposite of Eloise, and her grandmother. Then, his burial of clocks ― “And now ― a little grave for little clocks” (83), he says to Eloise ― symbolically connotes his disregard for women with their history of domesticity. Despite his self-promotion as an innovator of form, he is trapped in the antiquated patriarchal norms of gender hierarchy. The whole play thus becomes Glaspell’s ― if she really was a major hand in the writing of the play, as suggested by Ben-Zvi ― satirical attack on the self-contradictory male Modernism which was preoccupied with formal invention while stuck in the old paradigms of gender. This probably explains why Ian prefers the “tickless” “eternal time,” something set and stabilized, to the “tick” of the clock, an aural reminder of temporal
Similar to
4On this topic, see Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London and New York: Verso, 1989). 5For example, Ben-Zvi regarded the play as “a hilarious spoof of dreamers and the pitfalls they face” (Susan 207); Noe and Marlowe, a response to the contemporary scientific concerns with space and time advanced by Einstein; and Gainor, “a response to then current concerns with the growth of industrialism in America” and “the conflict between natural truth and industrial progress” (87-88).
III. Glaspell’s Historical Optimism -- Alison’s House
If
Set in Alison’s old homestead on the Mississippi, on “the last day of the nineteenth century, December 31, 1899” (3),
A turning point is brought by Agatha, who changes her mind just before her sudden death in the second act. With a short dying wish, “For ― Elsa” (107), she passes on Alison’s unknown love poems, contained in a “leather portfolio,” to Stanhope’s daughter Elsa, a social rebel who “ran away with the husband of [Louise’s] best friend” (77) and has just come back to the house. Elsa “did so want to come” to Alison’s house for “the last time.” “It wasn’t that I wanted to. I had to” (113), she says, suggesting that she was summoned by some mysterious call from the poet. Stanhope believes Elsa “harmed” and “disgraced” (71) the family, comparing her transgression with his and Alison’s forbidden loves abandoned long ago. Yet reading Alison’s poems, “the story she never told” about the “anguish and beauty of her love” (139), he regrets having thwarted Alison’s love for a married English professor: “In this room I asked her to stay. He was below” (140). Elsa realizes that this must have been “a death” for the poet, which was written into “life eternal” in her poetry so that it could be “found” later (141). For the rest of the play, a generational clash unfolds regarding the fate of Alison’s poems. The young claim that “they are for the world” (148), while Stanhope refuses “to show her heart to the world” (142), wishing to destroy the poems before “her century” (142) goes, as it will protect his sister’s “intimate papers” against the “vulgar world” (145). A strong opposition to this puritan and patriarchal imprisonment of Alison’s legacy within a private space is raised by Elsa, a new woman playing a nemesis to the Victorian patriarch: “It’s Alison’s heart. You wouldn’t keep that from -- living in the world she loved” (146). Ann, the family’s young secretary and daughter of Stanhope’s suppressed lover of old, who has now fallen in love with the reporter Knowles, joins the young voice. She begs Stanhope to give Elsa the final decision on the poems, “because Alison said it ― for women” (150), and let Alison “speak for Elsa, Mother, and me” (150), the women in love, past and present. At the clock’s stroke ushering in the twentieth-century, the play ends with Stanhope, an embodiment of Victorian patriarchal values, surrendering to his daughter, a new woman condemned for making a daring choice so different from that of her Victorian foremothers, and acknowledging the poems as Alison’s “little gifts” “from her century to yours . . . For Elsa ― From Alison” (154).
A sexually liberated new woman who chose love over social convention is adopted as an heir to the literary “gifts” from a Victorian poet, a victim of “an age when people did not tell their love” (149-50). Reflected in the solidarity established between two generations of women in love are Glaspell’s feeling about her own adulterous love with Cook, which wound up with marriage in the end, and her often-cited credo put in
This aspect of the playwright’s personal life was central to the reading of the play by the eminent drama critic Bigsby, who criticized her on the point that “the moral complexities of her originally adulterous affair with Jig Cook never really seem to have ceased fascinating her” (26), and that she was “intent on offering yet another justification for herself and her actions” (27-28). But, as Gainor put it, it is too “simplistic” to dismiss the play as some “therapeutic exercise to relieve feelings of guilt” (232). Apart from the author’s personal experience, the adulterous love thematized in the play could be equally considered, I believe, as a metonymic representation of broader feminist issues at the
Yet as a New Woman writer, Glaspell could not embrace Alison/Dickinson simply as a positive precursor and role model, for the poet equally embodies a cautionary tale of Victorian womanhood. As Gilbert and Gubar noted in their very brief discussion of
In all probability, Glaspell projects her own wish into a young avatar by designing her to posit a poet mother as an ultimate authority to bless her rebellious love. Historical optimism comes to the fore with the Victorian poet’s legacy mediating the cultural transition between the end of the oppressive old era and the dawn of modernity, whose promise is presented in the form of a woman’s liberation from the puritan/Victorian ideals of privacy and emotional repression.
Through a reordering of the biographical material ― replacing Dickinson, dead in 1886, with Alison, dead five years earlier, and Lavinia, her sister, with Agatha, both dead in the last year of the nineteenth-century ― Glaspell follows her own logic of time re-chronicling the shift from “the blackest page of our history” (92), the so-called Alison’s century, to the dawn of the twentieth-century. The whole nineteenth-century receives her idiosyncratic feminist re-evaluation: Eben, the poetically gifted first son of Stanhope speaks for Glaspell as he mourns over Alison’s “century going ― her century . . . the whole century being piled on top of her, that she couldn’t get out from under” (36-7), implying the weight of patriarchal oppression over a talented literary woman confined in the private sphere of domesticity.
The turn of the century ― “December 31, 1899” (3) ― set as the midpoint between the dark Victorian past and the hope-loaded feminist future in the twentieth century leaves us wondering at the historical vision that drove Glaspell to draw such an
A common sense tells us that we may become retrospective and nostalgic when our present does not measure up to our past. A list of things on both social and personal levels may have amounted to the disappointing present for Glaspell in the late 1920’s before the premiere and publication of
In addition, the raging anti-liberal cultural politics of the Red Scare pushed them to the corner. The gloom over Heterodoxy, a radical feminist club “for unorthodox women” of which Glaspell was a member, illustrates the feminist deadlock at the time:
The unfavorable political and cultural climate for the feminist fronts perhaps drove Glaspell to look back on the time into which she could better project the prospect of women’s progress.
On the personal level, in the mid- through late twenties Glaspell had to part from the collaborative legacy with Cook. Until his death in 1924, she had been a submissive wife and self-degrading partner with the charismatic director and writer: she collaborated in the Provincetown Players writing dramas on his demand, sacrificing her true passion for the novel; when Cook fell apart from the Players, she faithfully followed him to Greece, which was his idea of an ideal place to settle in. After his death, for nearly three years she was wholly devoted to editing and writing about his legacy and literary achievements:
This historical retrospection of Glaspell’s can be misunderstood as of a kind with the reactionary and regressive historiography of male Modernism. However, her return to the past, which I explained in terms of the political climate and the personal circumstance she was situated in, is distinct from the other’s circulative notion of history by holding to a faith in the linear progress of history. This faith originates in the peculiar position of women with respect to the dissolution of the nineteenth-century. As Raymond Williams remarked, “When a social order is dying, it grieves for itself, but at that very time it might be expected that all those who have suffered under it can at last release quite opposite feelings: of relief, at least; or of confident reconstruction; or of rejoicing” (97). The “feelings of relief” and “of confident reconstruction” exuded by Elsa who is triumphant over and hopeful for the upcoming century at the end of
These contrary positions of men and women may have determined either backward or forward historiographies of Cook and Glaspell. Again, Showalter makes a case for Glaspell’s future-oriented progressive feminist historiography, as opposed to its conservative male counterpart, in her pointed observation that “while male artists in the
6Waterman, for example, asserted that Alison is “a thinly disguised Emily Dickinson” (87). The play’s earliest reviewers, between 1930 and 1931, made similar comments. For a detailed account of these, see Mary Papke, 92-97. Katharine Rodier’s award-winning essay offers an excellent survey of the biographic sources and parallels between the play and the Dickinson biographies. The young Mabel Loomis Todd, who later became a mistress of Dickinson’s brother Austin and editor of her poetry collections in the 1890’s, described the poet in a letter as “the character of Amherst . . . a lady whom the people call the ‘Myth’: She has not been outside of her house in fifteen years . . . . She dresses wholly in white, and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful” (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton 839). 7About her aunt’s secret love, Bianchi wrote: “It was instantaneous, overwhelming, impossible. There is no doubt that two predestined souls were kept apart only by her high sense of duty, and the necessity for preserving love untarnished by the inevitable destruction of another woman’s life” (47). 8Showalter examines “New Woman” as part of the “sexual anarchy” characterizing the culture at the fin de siècle in the third chapter of Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1992). 9Dickinson’s poems in the text are from Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960). References to her work are cited parenthetically with the editor’s initial “J” followed by their numbers in the edition.