ABSTRACT
The life, thought, and writing of Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) are characterized by vivid contrasts and sharp ambiguities, identified by Mary Papke as her “dualist and conflictual vision of human experience” (Papke 2006: 7), thus presenting a challenge for those readers who are anxious to pigeonhole early twentiethcentury women into an essentialized compartment as feminists. Glaspell was undoubtedly a feminist of her times, but she was also a modernist reformer who firmly believed that she could improve society, not by marching with zealous acolytes but by bringing attention through her writing to the injustices and social ills that troubled her. As she explained in an interview given in 1921, “I am interested in all progressive movements, whether feminist, social or economic . . . but I can take no very active part other than through my writing” (Rohe 1921: 4). For a time, she saw the solution in socialism, and in her novel The Visioning (1911) she argued that this imported ideology “tempered by a purely American idealism, garnered from an amalgam of Emerson’s transcendentalism, Nietzsche’s overcoming, and Haeckel’s oneness” (Ozieblo 2000: 47), could bring about a transformation of society. However, her feminism, socialism, and idealism were always controlled by the tension that arose from the inevitable clash of her convictions. Her firm belief in individual freedom of choice and freedom of speech was challenged by a belief just as firm in one’s obligations and responsibilities to friends, family, and society, while her modernist desire to break out and seek new ways of life conflicted with her Victorian upbringing in a traditional, religious family.
