Susan Keating Glaspell was one of the most important American authors in the early twentieth century. A journalist, fiction writer, and dramatist, Glaspell was a founder of the Provincetown Players, the “little theater” often considered the birthplace of serious drama in this country. Yet despite earning a Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House in 1931, Glaspell and her work were largely ignored for decades, overshadowed by the plays of her more famous Provincetown colleague, Eugene O'Neill. With the surge of interest in women's literary output that began in the 1970s, however, Glaspell's oeuvre began to gain renewed critical interest.

Emeline Jouve's volume interrogates the playwright's dramatic canon. Jouve concentrates particularly on those works that support her contention that “rebellion permeates every level of Glaspell's dramatic endeavor” (15). Drawing on Robert Brustein's groundbreaking The Theatre of Revolt (1964), Jouve divides the playwright's canon into three categories: the “Drama of Denunciation,” in which Glaspell explores “what she views as the flaws of her society”; the “Drama of Resistance,” which “focuses on the dramatization of rebellion at the level of the mythos,” and her “Drama of Hope,” which “considers the perspectives opened up by the revolt and elaborates on the alternative envisaged by Glaspell to replace the oppressive structures.” In sum, Jouve argues, “Glaspell's drama can be defined as a drama of positive revolt, and therefore a drama of hope” (16–17). In this last way, Glaspell's work differs from most of what we consider “modern drama,” including O'Neill's dark tragedies.

Jouve offers a brief biographical portrait that will be useful to newcomers to the Glaspell canon. Her greatest attention is focussed on Glaspell's most significant works, notably Trifles and The Verge. Trifles is her best-known text and one of the finest one-act plays in the English language. Jouve has done her homework and draws usefully on Glaspell scholars who have preceded her, including Linda Ben Zvi, J. Ellen Gainor, Noelia Hernando-Real, Marcia Noe, Barbara Ozieblo, and Mary Papke. Jouve is also a close reader who does some particularly astute exegeses of Glaspell's stage directions, which are helpful to readers if not to viewers. As an outsider – Jouve is French – she brings a unique perspective to the ways that Glaspell, in works such as Close the Book and Inheritors, critiques the contradictions between democratic theory and practice in the United States. One thing that neither Glaspell nor Jouve could have known when they were writing was how eerily relevant both the former's plays and the latter's interpretation would be in 2018. Close the Book and Inheritors, written in 1917 and 1921 respectively, valorize characters who support immigrants’ rights and censure those who would restrict democracy to select groups deemed worthy of citizenship. As Jouve points out, Madeline Morton, the protagonist of Inheritors, “denounces the hypocrisy of the American leaders, who turn the principles at the core of the foundations of the United States into empty rhetoric to preserve their own privileges at the expense of the well-being of the whole community” (92). The first production of this play was even scrutinized by government authorities on suspicion of being unpatriotic, but the officials (like many bureaucrats) had little interest in the arts and left the theater early. No charges were brought.

Jouve distinguishes Glaspell's “idealistic” rebels from those whose concerns are “individualistic.” Jouve's knowledge is both wide and deep; in her discussions she cites thinkers as diverse as Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Plato, Michel Foucault, and Lewis Carroll. Jouve finds Albert Camus's The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt particularly useful when applied to Glaspell's heroes. Idealistic rebels, like Madeline, fight for causes larger than their own rights. In The People, the disenchanted staff of a radical publication are recalled to their original purpose by their readers, who may lack the education of the journal's contributors but possess a sincere belief in the necessity for social change.

“Like the Camusian revolutionists,” on the other hand, “individualist rebels have lost sight of any political agenda and fight … to defend their personal interests alone” (131). Characters in this category include Mrs. Patrick in The Outside and Elsa in Alison's House. Glaspell evokes sympathy for these figures, but none attracts the audience's admiration the way her idealistic characters do. Still, The Verge's individualistic (and singular) protagonist Claire is unquestionably one of Glaspell's most intriguing creations; Jouve wryly observes that “Claire's final genuine or symbolical insanity has caused a lot of ink to flow” (163). Extending the work of previous scholars, Jouve considers the likely influence of both Robert Wiene's expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Sigmund Freud's “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905) on Glaspell's depiction of a tortured female scientist. Jouve ultimately concludes, however, that Claire's madness most closely echoes that of the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892): her “hysteria is not a pathology but a form of rebellion against social constraints” (156).

Much of the last section of Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion is devoted to Jouve's convincing claim that the playwright saw hints of salvation in the coming together of like-minded characters, especially women. As she observes, plays as diverse as Trifles, The Outside, and Inheritors celebrate the necessity of individuals uniting to fight against patriarchal power. In this light, Jouve might have mentioned the other female writers involved in the Provincetown Players – notably Neith Boyce, Louise Bryant, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Rita Wellman – some of whose work influenced, and was influenced by, Glaspell's comedies and dramas.

Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion is a valuable addition to the growing shelf of critical books on a major writer. Emeline Jouve succeeds in demonstrating how thoughtful, even radical, Susan Glaspell's critiques of American society were when she wrote them a century ago. Equally important – and frightening – is how relevant Glaspell's analysis of American hypocrisy remains today.