| Throughout her career, writer Susan Glaspell voiced her belief in the generally unrecognized strength of women and her dismay at their suppression. Such novels as Ambrose Holt and Family, The Glory Of the Conquered, Fugitive's Return, and Judd Rankin's Daughter; such short stories as "Out There," "The Busy Duck," "The Return of Rhoda," "From A to Z," and "Contrary to Precedent"; and such plays as Trifles, "Chains of Dew," Alison's House, The Verge, and Inheritors feature strong female characters who struggle to make themselves heard in a world that often ignored women. Of particular interest to Glaspell were creative women, like herself, who wanted artistic freedom usually denied them by patriarchal society. Thus, the artistic female characters who people her works chafe against the limiting domestic domain they are expected to inhabit. Their struggles expose the need for a redefinition of art and artist, an expansion of the borders those terms imply--borders that prevent women and the various media they choose for self-expression from being supported and recognized as valuable. Glaspell, both in her own life and with her female artist characters, searches for ways in which creative women can move across boundaries into new and uncharted spiritual and artistic geography. One strategy Glaspell employs in this search is experimentation, both social and literary. Her works are feminist and decidedly modernist, reflecting her philosophy that borders should be challenged, verges gone beyond, and patterns eschewed in the quest for an art that educates the public to the capabilities of the creative woman. Glaspell urges her audiences to question hegemony; she challenges them to be supportive of women's creativity and to seek new outlets for artistic expression. She desires the reinvention of the world of art into a more expansive and inclusive place, a place that allows women artists the freedom they need to shape wide open spaces to fit their own individual requirements as artists and as women. In all her works, Glaspell imagines this place and seeks to write it into existence, an idealistic goal she was able to achieve only in her fictions. |
