| Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, the author of fourteen plays and over fifty novels. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded Provincetown Players, a little theatre group that gave impetus to the experimental efforts of serious American playwrights, most notably Eugene O’Neill. Glaspell was most noted for her fourteen plays written specifically for the Provincetown Players, which was seen as the model that contrasted to the commercial Broadway plays and they were unconventional for her ear.One distinctive feature of Glaspell’s plays is the absence of the female protagonist. The most widely published and best known work of her is the first play Trifles (1916). In this one-act play Glaspell uses a device:a protagonist who never appears on stage. In her other two longer plays Bernice (1919) and Alison’s House (1930) she returns to this device. All the female protagonists in these plays are absent, that is, the heroines the whole play talking about never appear on stage. By using the device of protagonist absence, Glaspell depicts various predicaments such as they are being silenced or being unaccepted by the others. However, the absence does not mean that women are weak or helpless, on the contrary, the playwright uniquely annotates this special device and digs out the significance of female rebellion.My thesis focuses on the three plays of Glaspell—Trifles, Alison s House, and Bernice, discusses the predicament and relief of three absent women respectively, exploring a new angle in the study of Glaspell. Through the analysis of the predicaments confronted by absent protagonists, we can capture Glaspell’s liberations of the voices that have been repressed by patriarchy society. By emphasizing that the restoration of women’s power occurs through a female medium, Glaspell liberates the female muse, whose vocal power has been usurped by male power and gives them a final relief. |
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