| The plays of Susan Glaspell, cofounder of the Provincetown Players, were unconventional for her era (1916-1922). As part of the modern American drama movement, Glaspell fashioned a resisting stage language to solicit the imaginative collaboration of her audience--an occurrence that reflects her conception of the theatrical event. Dramatizing a collision between patriarchal definitions and the self-authorizing female voice, she leads her audience into dialogically examining their internalized perceptions of women.; My study begins with biography, demonstrating how Glaspell's dependence upon and resistance to patriarchal authority shapes her writing. Glaspell modeled the struggle reflected in her female protagonists and her naturalistic sets after her own struggle for a separate artistic identity. In the next chapter, I argue that Glaspell's dramatic practices were informed by a modernist vision of spectatorship. Within the fourth dimension of the theatrical event, Glaspell anticipated that the audience would discover a relationship between the dramatized struggle and their own internal conflicts.; The subsequent chapters analyze how the convergence of verbal and nonverbal languages enact language struggle. Chapter Three argues that in "Trifles," "The People," "Close the Book," "The Outside," and "Woman's Honor" Glaspell encourages audience resistance through the resisting dialogue of the female characters. As women contradict the meanings implied by the male characters' speech, they counter the fixed notions informing hegemonic thought. In Chapter Four, I examine Glaspell's use of the absent/silent woman in "Trifles," Bernice, and Alison's House, and argue that this figure functions as a medium that inspires female speech. As the onstage women vocalize the silent woman's repressed experience, the audience experiences the tension produced by women's struggle with a language model that seeks to silence them. Chapter Five examines how The Verge, The Inheritors, and Chains of Dew depict a female quest to create an alternative language free of gender distinctions. But although the female protagonists are inspired by an androgynous vision, they end up reinscribing themselves within the very hierarchical system they seek to subvert. Glaspell leaves the audience to resolve the tensions produced by her equivocal resolutions. |
