SUSAN GLASPELL AND THE ANXIETY OF EXPRESSION: LANGUAGE AND ISOLATION IN THEPLAYS by KRISTINA HINZ-BODEReview by: Marcia NoeThe Eugene O'Neill Review, Vol. 30 (2008), pp. 165-168Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29784857 .Accessed: 25/06/2014 05:32

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Book Reviews 165

Mourning and Tragedy, but a careful look at Black's text reveals Diggins's regrettable inaccuracy: the fight took place at their house in Marblehead,

Massachusetts; if O'Neill had contemplated suicide that night, it would have been in the icy ocean waters surrounding that house, not the Charles River.

Furthermore, when the O'Neills later moved to Boston, they did live near the Charles River, but in a residential hotel overlooking the river, not in a house. As any good Boston cabby or ambulance driver can tell you, O'Neill would have been rushed from there to the Mass General Hospital, about two miles

away, and not to Salem Hospital, which is about twenty miles away; from

Marblehead, however, where they did live at the time of this fight, Salem

Hospital was a logical destination. Finally, in the bibliographical note at the end of his book, Diggins cites The Eugene O'Neill'Newsletter'and The Eugene O'Neill Review as important and valuable resources for further study of O'Neill's life and works, which surely they are, but Diggins then makes the

inexplicable error of identifying Frederick C. Wilkins as the current editor, when Professor Wilkins, the founding editor, in fact handed that title and

responsibility over to Zander Brietzke about five years ago. In The Hairy Ape, it is in Yank's reaching for the heights of understanding

that he attains greatness as a tragic figure (as do many other O'Neill

characters). In Eugene O'Neill's America, while Diggins may not offer much evidence of O'Neill's actual accomplishments as a dramatist, he does offer readers mountains of compelling evidence of O'Neill's reach as a thinker, and thus, reminds us that it is in O'Neill's reaching for the heights of

understanding, among other considerations, that he attains greatness as a

dramatist, indeed as America's most important and compelling dramatist.

Steven F. Bloom Lasell College

KRISTINA HINZ-BODE. SUSAN GLASPELL AND THE ANXIETY OF EXPRESSION: LANGUAGE AND ISOLATION IN THE PLAYS. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. 292 pp. ISBN 0-7864-2505-9.

An important recent contribution to the growing body of scholarship

on Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell, Kristina Hinz Bode's wide-ranging and complex study of eight major Glaspell plays is

grounded in semiotic, communication, and philosophical theory. In her

introduction, Hinz-Bode states that she intends to move Glaspell scholarship away from its feminist base and toward a consideration of what is universal in Glaspell's work, in this instance "a paradoxical sense of being

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166 The Eugene O'Neill Review

simultaneously isolated from and connected to others" (4), a major thematic

emphasis that informs much of Glaspell's oeuvre and certainly deserves further discussion. Within these thematic parameters, Hinz-Bode raises

questions about the nature of language, the making of meaning, and the function of communication, connecting Glaspell's work to a wider modernist cultural context that includes works by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, and Ibsen.

In her second chapter Hinz-Bode carefully builds the theoretical framework for her analysis of the plays, emphasizing two opposing assumptions about the nature of language and meaning: first, that language is a symbol system in which words have definite referents and thus meaning exists before communication begins; and second, that language constitutes all that we can know and know with, and meaning is therefore constructed

discursively. In Glaspell's plays, she asserts, these conflicting theories of communication and language are evident, sometimes existing side by side in the same play. Subsequent chapters examine this conflict in Trifles, The

People, The Outside, Bernice, Chains of Dew, The Verge, Alison 's House, and Springs Eternal, while her penultimate chapter discusses Glaspell's fiction in relation to several other plays.

Despite this initial conceptualization of her project, Hinz-Bode finds

gender a difficult analytical category to escape in a Susan Glaspell play. This is not a bad thing, because her analyses demonstrate that gender relations are

more complicated in these plays than previous feminist studies have shown, and she often redresses the imbalance of earlier feminist approaches by focusing on how and to what effect the male characters communicate. For

example, her language-focused discussion of Trifles emphasizes how the male characters use language to establish individuality, status, and distance from the women while the female characters communicate to forge bonds and establish community, demonstrating that meaning is constructed through human interaction not only by the female characters, but by the male characters also. Similarly, Hinz-Bode argues that The Outside is much more than a play about women's success and men's failure as other Glaspell scholars have affirmed. She notes that Trifles md The Outside share the same constellation of characters (three men, two women); however, in the latter play values are

reversed, so that the male characters represent community and the females are linked to distance. It is the male characters' verbal exchanges that prompt the female characters' return to the side of life.

Bernice is examined as a play about creating and controlling meaning. Again, Hinz-Bode connects the question of meaning to the question of the individual's relation to society as she shows how the characters' dialogue generates competing constructions of the absent protagonist. In Chains of

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Book Reviews 167

Dew the same issue of self vs. society is enacted, this time framed in terms of the artist's dilemma of negotiating the competing demands of art and life, complicated by an examination of the function of sacrifice in this process with a twist that shifts the focus to the

poet-protagonist's wife. Hinz-Bode's

reading of The Verge acknowledges earlier feminist interpretations but stresses that Claire is more than a woman searching for her female self. She is also a person "suspicious of the

possibilities of communication and distrustful of a community whose rules, in their necessity to regulate our co?

existence, will ever impede the self's

urge for freedom" (153), and a creator whose efforts to develop revolutionary forms of plant life reflect the kind of essentialism she professes to oppose and undermine the notion of language as a pre-existing sign system. Hinz Bode also explores how Glaspell positions the male characters in The Verge in relation to Claire's individualistic project, noting that Tom Edgeworthy occupies a marginal position that somewhat parallels Claire's, which gives the play more universal significance.

The discussion of Alison s House, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931, emphasizes the way Glaspell's treatment of the absent protagonist allows her both to affirm and interrogate essentialist notions of identity and

meaning. The sacrifices not only of Alison but also of John and Eben Stanhope highlight the tension between the needs of the individual and the demands of

society to conform to its moral norms, thus evincing that "society's gender roles can prove just as imprisoning for men as they typically are for women"

(192). Hinz-Bode's study demonstrates an impressive command of Glaspell

scholarship, which she puts in fruitful dialogue with her own insightful analyses of the plays. In focusing on the plays' enactment of the tensions between individual and society, isolation and connection, she links GlaspelPs work to the larger question of the one and the many that has been a

philosophical problem for centuries. Applying semiotics, philosophy, and communication theory, Hinz-Bode moves Glaspell beyond the feminist

approach that has dominated the field for the past thirty years. She allows us to view her plays from a more global perspective and thus to establish her as

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168 The Eugene O'Neill Review

a writer whose work transcends national and gender concerns while breaking a path for other Glaspell scholars to take a fresh look at the plays from equally underused theoretical perspectives.

Marcia Noe

University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

STEVEN F. BLOOM. STUDENT COMPANION TO EUGENE O'NEILL.

Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007. 207 pp. ISBN 978-0-313-33431-3.

It

would be more appropriate for this review to be read by students or even "general readers" than by the usual audience of The Eugene O'Neill

Review. After all, the book under scrutiny here is one of a series published by Greenwood Press called "Student Companions to Classic Writers" (my italics), and the series editor attempts to widen the readership by indicating that the series "has been designed to meet the needs of. . . general readers" also (again my italics). The students catered to seem to be high school or

college students, and all "classic writers" in the series are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely American. The general readers are somewhat more difficult to define for at a later point in the preface they have morphed into "adult library patrons." In any case, specialists and graduate students are

encouraged to look elsewhere: these Companions are not for them.

Well, maybe. I taught my first O'Neill plays 45 years ago. I had never had a course in O'Neill or in American theater?neither was thought of as English department stuff (in fact even American literature barely achieved many English department standards). I recall my desperation as I tried to prepare myself for the ordeal when there was no "googling" the internet for a quick fix, no Gelbs, no Sheaffer, no Jordan Miller to tell you where to search, no Ranald for looking up this and that, none of the marvelous books and articles that have appeared since the 1960s renaissance years of O'Neill scholarship and criticism. I would have sold my soul?and not just mine?for a Greenwood "Student Companion" then.

Now the situation is considerably different. Not only are there books

galore about O'Neill, there are books and articles about his times, his career, his plays, his friends, even books about the individual plays, yes and about the actors who played in his plays because they played in his plays. Eventually we even find books about the books. Now, what is in print, what is available

through the Internet, and what can be found in library databases promise to smother the specialists and graduate students. Alas for the high-school student, under-graduate, or the general reader.

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Article Contentsp. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168

Issue Table of ContentsThe Eugene O'Neill Review, Vol. 30 (2008), pp. 1-190Front MatterEditor's Foreword [pp. 4-6]EssaysO'Neill's Strange Interlude and the "Strange Marriage" of Louise Bryant [pp. 7-20]Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in "Long Day's Journey into Night" [pp. 21-36]"Why do I feel so lonely?": Literary Allusions and Gendered Space in "Long Day's Journey into Night" [pp. 37-47]The Hairy Ape's Humanist Hell: Theatricality and Evolution in O'Neill's "Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life" [pp. 1, 48-144]"Denial Without End": Benjamin De Casseres's Parody of Eugene O'Neill's "Days Without End" [pp. 145-159]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 160-165]Review: untitled [pp. 165-168]Review: untitled [pp. 168-170]Review: untitled [pp. 170-172]

Performance ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 173-176]Review: untitled [pp. 176-177]Review: untitled [pp. 178-180]

Back Matter