The Susan Glaspell Society

American Literature Association
17^th Annual Conference
San Francisco, CA, 25-28 May 2006

Susan Glaspell Society Sponsored Panel

“Trauma, Grief, and Recovery
in the Works of Susan Glaspell"

Chair:  Mary E. Papke, University of Tennessee

Modernist artists of the 1910’s and 1920’s famously captured in their work the cultural trauma and mourning of those who lived through World War I. Susan Glaspell throughout her very long career focused on the legacy of that and other wars as well as on a number of other national political traumas and catastrophic individual losses. The range of trauma Glaspell explores is great, from the death of children (for instance, in The Verge), the loss of family (Fugitive’s Return), the loss of self in madness or self-erasure (The Road to the Temple) to the loss of intellectual and political ideals (Inheritors) and the national trauma suffered in wartime (Judd Rankin’s Daughter). This panel explored specific cases of personal and collective trauma, loss, and, in some cases, recovery in the drama and fiction of Susan Glaspell. 

Papers and presenters:

“Glaspell, Freeman and Twain: Varied Voices in Magazine Fiction, 1913-1918,” Colette Lindroth, Caldwell College

“Embodied Loss: Absence and Presence in Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors,” 
Monica Stufft, University of California at Berkeley

“The Deracinated Self: Immigrants and Orphans in Susan Glaspell’s Fiction,” 
Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University
 

ATHE in Chicago, August 4, 2006

The American Theatre and Drama Society sponsored a staged reading of Susan Glaspell's Chains of Dew, directed by Cheryl Black, at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, featuring Cheryl's adaptation of the play with her prologue explicating the historical context and critical reaction to the original production, followed by a discussion.  The performer / discussants were:

Amy Pinney as Nora
Phil Groeschel as Leon
Brett Johnson as O'Brien
Barbara Ozieblo as Dotty Standish
Michael Solomonson as Seymore Standish
Cheryl Black as Mother Standish
Shari Troy as Mrs. MacIntyre
Monica Stufft as Edith

SEYMORE: My dear Dot, you know perfectly well I want you to have the Madonna hanging here. Since you like Madonnas, by all means let her bless our home. DOTTY: I'm not crazy about her.  But I didn't know what else to put up. Barbara Ozieblo as Dotty Mike Solomonson as Seymore Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" decorating the Standishes' living room wall.

MRS. MACINTYRE: (To Dotty) I think you're rather wonderful . . . letting Seymore go off to New York by himself as he does. Many wives--wouldn't understand. EDITH: Wouldn't understand that he goes on account of his poetry. MRS. MACINTYRE: Of course, he has to go from time to time--and get ideas. Otherwise, how would he have anything to write about? That's quite understandable. EDITH: Quite. Shari Troy as Mrs. MacIntyre Monica Stufft as Edith

MOTHER: Oh, I'm terribly to blame. I've seen him sacrificing for me all these years--and watched him bear me with such bright courage. Forgive me. Of course I don't know just how much Dotty does love Seymore. But I think perhaps she loves him enough to be his cross. It's so nice for Seymore to have a cross he loves. NORA: A gay life -- being a cross! Cheryl Black as Mother Amy Pinney as Nora

SEYMORE: Leon, I'm sorry to have to ask you--not to prolong this visit. Oh, I know what you must think of me. I--I wish it were different. LEON: But I just had everything arranged! Nora, this is your doing. You've bungled things as usual. SEYMORE: It isn't Nora who's bungled things--it's life. Mike Solomonson as Seymore Amy Pinney as Nora Phil Groeschel as Leon

Trifles in China

Students at SuZhou University in China performed Trifles in October, 2006, directed by Alexander Moffet from Grinnell University, as part of the 12th National Symposium on American Drama and Theater.  SGS member Ling Jian-e presented a paper, "Compulsory Private Space and Redemptive Sisterhood: Dramatic Space in Trifles and 'night Mother" and Linda Ben-Zvi was the Keynote Speaker at the Symposium.

The students performing in the above photograph are from Cast A

Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference

November 8 - 11, 2006
at the Sheraton Society Hill
Philadelphia, PA

Panel Sponsored by the Susan Glaspell Society:

“Susan Glaspell and Modernism”

Chair: Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University

While Susan Glaspell's overt feminism and innovative expressionism in plays such as Trifles and
The Verge have been widely discussed, the ways in which she continued to explore a modernist aesthetic and to express a modernist credo in other works – both drama and fiction – is less obvious. Glaspell's well-known comment on Virginia Woolf, "She makes the inner things real . . . .
If one could have what she has, or something of it, and have also story, that simple downright human interest," suggests, not that Glaspell rejected modernism, but that she sought a more nuanced, distinctly American modernist aesthetic. This panel explored Glaspell's investment in modernism, from its incipient expression in her early fiction, to its full flowering in her Provincetown plays, to its mature melding with fictional realism in her novels of the 30s and 40s. 

Papers and presenters:

“Susan Glaspell’s Lifted Masks: Modernism, Strangeness, and the New Woman,”
Drew Eisenhauer, University of Maryland

“Bonds of Love: Susan Glaspell’s Parodic Revision of the Sentimental Novel,”
Sharon Friedman, New York University

“A Room Not Her Own: The Modern Woman’s Struggle for Space in the Theatre of Susan Glaspell,” Noelia Hernando-Real, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
 

Roundtable sponsored by the Susan Glaspell Society:

"Trifles and Beyond: Teaching Susan Glaspell Roundtable Discussion"

Chair: Barbara Ozieblo, University of Málaga, Spain

The roundtable discussion examined the teaching of Susan Glaspell’s plays and novels with the intention of spurring faculty to look beyond Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers,” the two pieces that most commonly appear in anthologies, the classroom, and amateur production. Discussants looked at how Susan Glaspell’s plays, stories, and novels fit into courses on feminism, on modernism and on women writers; how her works can be advantageously used in first-year composition courses, literature courses and graduate courses; how her works fit into other disciplines and how they can be used to exemplify different tendencies in critical theory.

Participants and Topics:   

Mary Papke (University of Tennessee), “Glaspell’s Trifles/ ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ in the Composition or Literature Classroom”

Patricia L. Bryan (University of North Carolina School of Law), “Teaching Susan Glaspell in Law School”

Martha C. Carpentier (Seton Hall University), “Teaching Brook Evans to Graduate and Undergraduates in Courses on Women Writers”

Mike Solomonson (Northland Pioneer College), “Teaching and Performing Brook Evans”

Barbara Ozieblo (University of Malaga): “Teaching The Outside and The Verge”

From left to right: Mike Solomonson, Martha Carpentier, Barbara Ozieblo, Patricia Bryan, and Mary Papke

Nora in America: A Staged Reading of Glaspell's
Chains of Dew at the SSAWW Conference

On Friday, November 10, 2006, Society members presented Glaspell's Chains of Dew, her final play with the Provincetown Players, originally performed in 1922.  The play was adapted and included a prologue by Cheryl Black, who also directed the reading.

 From left to right: Judith Barlow as Edith, Martha Carpentier as Mother Standish, Mike Solomonson as Seymore Standish, Barbara Ozieblo as Diantha (Dotty) Standish, Drew Eisenhauer as Leon Whittaker, director Cheryl Black, and Doug Powers as James O'Brien.