Dissertation Abstract*
INHERITORS OF PROGRESS:
GLASPELL, THE UNIVERSITY, AND LIBERAL CULTURE
IN THE UNITED STATES
GLASPELL, THE UNIVERSITY, AND LIBERAL CULTURE
IN THE UNITED STATES
"Liberal" culture in the United States involves ways of thinking and behaving that encourage sexual freedom, that value ethnic diversity, that practice peace, that resist the degradations of free market capitalism, and that confront the legacies of European colonialism. These ethics derive from the twin intellectual traditions of liberal political theory and scientific method. It flourishes in colleges and universities, and it has a peculiar social geography in the United States. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring into relief the situation of liberal culture -- that it has a coherent set of descriptive ethics around which groups of people already congregate, but that such groups remain, in a sense, dispirited. The figure of Susan Glaspell (1876 - 1948), American playwright, poet, biographer and fiction-writer, offers a unique window into the history of the ideas of liberal culture; she was present as this culture took its nascent form. This study of Glaspell's writings and her career, invested as they were in the possibilities of a new ethical culture taking shape in the U.S., show the university in particular as unable to fully acknowledge its progressive inheritance.
Inheritors of Progress demonstrates the coherence of an array of liberal values, and emphasizes the importance of conceiving these values as coherent. The study traces the ideas that would now be popularly labeled as "liberal" through a close reading of Glaspell's 1921 drama Inheritors back their sources in liberal political philosophy - principally, the philosophy of John Dewey, but also that of Ortega y Gasset, Mill, Thoreau, Jefferson, the Federalists, Rousseau, and Locke. As part of this demonstration, I examine the performance of non-violent political protest as an embodied act of the philosophy of liberty as these writers have theorized it.
Through a close reading of Glaspell’s The Verge and a comparative study of The Verge and Inheritors, both of 1921, the dissertation explores a strand of ideas that emerged with these ethics, but did not gain the cultural traction of other liberal values. The concept of progress that informed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse was the product of competing philosophies, including the Protestant ethics of “good works,” and various forms of Darwinism and other evolutionary ideas. Glaspell’s voice sounds in a chorus of reformist voices from the Progressive Era: John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Alice Paul, Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman and Herbert Croly. Abetted by an broad view of Western history into periods of classical, Christian, and scientific, Glaspell, more clearly than her contemporaries, expressed an idea of “progress” as a kind of natural religion. The secularizing university was to have maintained its role as the moral compass of American society. However, in Inheritors and The Verge, Glaspell became disillusioned with progress and with moral science. My study of Glaspell’s work reveals new insights into the provenance of such ideas of natural religion, finds new ways to trace the instabilities that made this concept of progress untenable at the time, and unearths some aspects of this progress that might still be viable.
Glaspell’s oeuvre is a particularly fertile site for this kind of cultural inquiry, not only because her plays and fiction are woven of these ethics, but also because of the dualities of her career. She speaks for the Midwestern heartland and for the liberal enclaves of Greenwich Village and Provincetown. She is a popular fiction writer, and she is part of the high modernist rebellion against the commercial theatre. Her early work is full of religious fervor, especially about higher education, but her late work expresses a grief that the intellectual activity of the United States in the mid-century is so completely secular in its outlook. Until 1921, these dualities were latent in her work, but after 1921, they became increasingly pronounced. For this reason, her two plays from 1921 form the main subject of this dissertation, but the close readings of these plays become meaningful only as they are framed by the history of the author.
Finally, in the conclusion of this dissertation, I look at Glaspell's writings about American institutions of higher learning, and compare what she had to say about these institutions with how her work has been received within them. The intensely ethical subject matter of Glaspell’s plays and fiction made them unpalatable to the twentieth-century critics who established the canons of American literature and the disciplinary boundaries of literary study. However, regarded from a more general perspective, the ethics of which Glaspell wrote are inscribed everywhere in the humanities, underlying much of our contemporary scholarship. What Glaspell's work teaches us is that the humanities, as well as the larger liberal culture, has been enervated by a reluctance to acknowledge its own moral dimensions. With the political culture of the United States now so polarized, we need to acknowledge both the ethical coherence of of liberal culture and the university's role as a moral compass to the larger society.
This dissertation has been previously indexed and referenced under the working titles:
"Winds in Prison," & "The Liberal Humanism of Susan Glaspell"
"Winds in Prison," & "The Liberal Humanism of Susan Glaspell"