Review from Theatre History Studies 26 (Annual 2006) 154
By: Marcia Noe
Date: 2006
 

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. By Linda Ben-Zvi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 476 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland. By Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.278 pp. $23.95 cloth.

Two new contributions to Glaspell scholarship make compelling reading and provide much new information for scholars of theatre, American literature, and women's studies. In her new life of Susan Glaspell, Linda Ben-Zvi gives us an accurate, exceptionally well-researched, and skillfully written account of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's life and works. The most thoroughgoing Glaspell biography published to date, Ben-Zvi's book, twenty years in the making, draws on interviews with an impressive number of Glaspell's colleagues, friends, and family members as well as on holdings in the major manuscript repositories previously consulted by other Glaspell biographers. Moreover, Ben-Zvi's access to privately held documents has resulted in much new material about many aspects of Glaspell's life about which we previously had little information, such as her pioneer ancestry, relationship with her mother, college activities, pre-Provincetown years in Chicago, and, most importantly, her relationships with Norman Matson, a novelist with whom she lived for eight years, and Langston Moffett, a frequent companion during her final decade. Of the previously unexamined documents that Ben-Zvi worked with are Norman Matson's unpublished autobiographical novel, in which Glaspell appears as "Ruth" and the first-person "Notes for American Biography" by Glaspell, which is held by the Shain Library at Connecticut College. Because Glaspell kept few diaries or journals, this essay is a significant discovery.

Ben-Zvi sets out to examine the life of the Puhtzer Prize-winning playwright within a number of different contexts, and consequently her book actually tells three stories: Glaspell's story; the story of George Cram Cook, her husband; and the story of the Provincetown Players, the little-theatre company they founded in 1915. This tripartite emphasis makes an important contribution to scholarship in American theatre history. By including detailed discussions of Glaspell's and Cook's work with the Provincetown Players, Ben-Zvi gives us a fuller, more complex understanding of how this group actually operated and, in so doing, dispels the widespread impression that modern American drama began with Eugene O'Neill and that he was mainly responsible for the Provincetown Players' success. Although it contains a few errors of fact, none very important, Ben-Zvi's book adds much to our knowledge of all three subjects without losing its focus on Glaspell. One way that Ben-Zvi achieves unity and focus despite dealing with a wealth of information on many topics is to emphasize throughout the theme of the pioneer that runs through Glaspell's life and works; not only did Glaspell draw upon her own pioneer background in much of her work, but she took a pioneering role in creating a new kind of American drama, in focusing cultural attention on women's lives and issues, and in continually breaking new ground and working against outmoded or too-confining structures, be they social, literary, or theatrical.

Another welcome addition to Glaspell scholarship is Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf's Midnight Assassin, a study of the 1901 murder trial of Margaret Hossack, which Glaspell covered as a young journalist and on which she based her most famous play (Trifles) and short story ("A Jury of Her Peers"). An essential addition to the libraries of Glaspell scholars, this book builds on the research that Linda Ben-Zvi conducted in the early 1990s, originally published in Theatre Journal as "Murder, She Wrote: The Genesis of Susan Glaspell's Trifles," and expands on research Bryan published in 1997 in the Stanford Law Review ("Stories in Fiction and in Fact: Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury of Her Peers' and the 1901 Murder Trial of Margaret Hossack").

Written in lively, nonfiction novel style, Midnight Assassin provides a full account of the murder of Iowa farmer John Hossack and the subsequent trial of his wife, Margaret, which ended in her first-degree murder conviction. Although Glaspell's play and story suggest that Margaret did, in fact, murder her husband, Bryan and Wolf provide much information--taken from interviews, court transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other documents--that suggests several other possibilities. Three case studies of nineteenth-century American women in troubled family relationships, two of whom were tried for the murders of their relatives, are embedded within the narrative and deepen our understanding of Margaret Hossack's situation.

Bryan and Wolf are not able to tell us who killed John Hossack and why; however, their book is valuable for the social context it establishes, a social context that illumines why Margaret Hossack was so easily convicted in a case based on compromised, questionable, incomplete, and circumstantial evidence. Thus, in its treatment of topics such as late-nineteenth-century gender roles, legal and judicial practices, and cultural norms governing rural Midwestern community and family life, Midnight Assassin offers anyone who is planning to teach or stage Trifles much valuable information that will enhance his or her understanding of one of America's most famous one-act plays.

Perhaps the book's greatest strength lies in its historicized and regionalized discussion of gender, a primary theme in both Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers," As the authors point out, "It was a time when notions about justice, law, and the roles of men and women in society were in transition" (xiv). Specifically, the book expands our understanding of how gender-based values and expectations drove the Hossack trial and shaped its conclusion. Although several years earlier, Lizzie Borden had been acquitted of the murder of her parents, the tall, sturdily built, unattractive Margaret Hossack, in her mid-fifties at the time of her husband's death, could not project to the jury the same aura of femininity, in those days inextricably linked to notions of innocence and goodness, that worked so well for the young Massachusetts woman. Moreover, evidence that Mr. Hossack had repeatedly threatened, hit, and thrown objects at his wife, which a defense attorney today might find useful in creating sympathy among the jurors for his client, was downplayed by Mrs. Hossack's lawyer, keenly aware that his jury of conservative Iowa farmers would construe any neighbor's testimony about domestic violence in the Hossack household as private familial business that should not be shared with outsiders and as stronger evidence of Mrs. Hossack's motive for murder than of Mr. Hossack's reprehensible behavior. Further, along with its detailed examination of the stories that witnesses, largely male, told on the stand in the Hossack trial, the book also focuses on the stories of Margaret Hossack's female neighbors that the jury did not hear, suggesting that Glaspell may have found these untold but compelling stories, as well as the reason for their exclusion, to be the major source of inspiration for her play as well as of its spine and through-line.

Ben-Zvi and Bryan and Wolf have made lasting contributions to Glaspell scholarship; their books are highly recommended reading.