Historiographies of Modernity: Susan Glaspell and “Jig” Cook

Abstract

A disparity in the tenors of Susan Glaspell and “Jig” Cook’s modernist projects seems inevitable due to the hierarchical gender relation underneath the “companionate” façade of their marriage. A conspicuous sign of this disparity is the clashing historiographies between male and female characters in Tickless Time (1918) and Alison’s House (1930). A collaborative short comedy by Glaspell and Cook, Tickless Time presents a male visionary named Ian, immersed in the task of replacing the “tick” sounds of the clocks and watches at home with a sundial, and his wife who is “afraid of tickless time.” Her emotional and practical attachment to the aural materiality ― “the tick” ― of temporal movement contrasts with her husband’s preference for “eternal time,” which he believes to be delivered by the sundial. The couple may reflect the contrasting historiographies of Glaspell and Cook, one eager for the forward movement of time, and the other returning the present to the mythic and primitive past of civilization in an affinity with the ahistorical “classicism” championed by such celebrated male modernists as Eliot and Joyce. A rather timid female eagerness for temporal movement in Tickless Time evolves in Alison’s House into feminist optimism about the progress of history. A socially condemned New Woman character in the play greets the dawn of the twentieth-century under auspices of the legacy of a Victorian foremother. Closely reading the two plays, this article aims to explore the clashing historiographies of Glaspell and Cook, and contextualize them within the broader gender politics of Modernism.