Glaspell’s House of Her Own: Revisiting the Subject and Genre of Alison’s House

Abstract

In a departure from previous critical approaches to Alison’s House, this study aims to move beyond their core premise that the play mainly retells the life of Emily Dickinson, redirecting its focus to the playwright Susan Glaspell invested in the play. “The play was in no way founded on the life of Dickinson,” the writer said, as “it grew out of a feeling for her work and character.” Glaspell’s empathic portrayal of Dickinson is more than a mere participation in the nationwide centennial celebration of the poet in 1930, since its conjuration of women’s literary tradition registers the playwright’s own personal urgency to locate herself in the tradition of her peers. Following up with Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s flitting mention of Alison’s House as one of the modern women writers’ attempts to “affiliate” with their female predecessors, this study explores the biographical context surrounding the play’s composition in search of a motive for Glaspell’s affiliation with a poet mother, with a special emphasis on her dynamic with George Cram Cook, her husband, and founder of the Provincetown Players. Besides Glaspell’s subject choice, an equal weight is given to her generic form in this study. Her playwriting for the Provincetown Players was initially carried on under Cook’s insistence and she eventually felt it encroaching on her writer’s autonomy and career in fiction, which she would call “my own writing.” This study suggests a possibility that the generic form of Alison’s House, Glaspell’s first and last play to be staged and published as a solo after Cook’s death, may have been a contemplated formal maneuver to refute his control over her playwriting decision and proclaim her to be a single authority that counted in her generic choice. In this reading, Glaspell’s form resonates with the larger message of her subject, which is a matrilineal authority to support her writing as a woman.