In Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion, Emeline Jouve provides a diligent survey of the playwright's sole-authored works. Revisiting Robert Brustein's concept of modern drama to measure the political efficacy of Glaspell's dramaturgy, Jouve aligns her project with recent criticism that foregrounds the artist's works as a conduit for asserting women's rights. This writing continues in the tradition of those recuperative strategies practiced among scholars publishing work on Glaspell since the 1980s, as Jouve reiterates the saliency of the playwright's feminist and civically engaged politics in the representation of gender in the public sphere. This book is a major contribution to Glaspell studies as a result of its substantial survey of the artist's plays as well as Jouve's careful attention to the secondary literature on the playwright.

Jouve organizes the book into three parts. Part I, “Susan Glaspell's Drama of Denunciation,” shows how Glaspell's plays expose “the duplicity of American democracy” (21) through the reimagining of playwriting as a “weapon of political incrimination” (17). For Jouve, Glaspell's plays put American conventions on trial for failing to adhere to democratic ideals, particularly where women's rights and free speech are concerned. Readers might recognize a well-established argument from Glaspell studies in that the playwright's career in journalism is seen as formative for her development as a playwright. Going beyond this narrative in Chapter 1, Jouve claims that Glaspell's Trifles (1916) subverts the judicial concept of a “jury of one's peers” by casting its spectators as jurors during a time when half of the population could not exercise their right to jury service (26). Chapter 2 attends to the home's ability to “literalize[ ] the metaphor of social invisibility” (59) in Trifles, Woman's Honor (1918), and Alison's House (1930). As Jouve asserts, these domestic spaces are not only restrictive but also generative. Through the act of writing, the home stands as a transformative container for identity formation. Glaspell's characters manage to utilize writing as a means to “‘deterritorialize the self’” (68), to quote Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1995). Part I closes with Chapter 3, a deft analysis of the inherent theatricality of nationalist rhetoric in Close the Book (1917), Free Laughter (1919), and Inheritors (1921), that interweaves theories of mimesis with Halbwachs's “typology of memories” (autobiographical/historical memory) (83).

In Part II, “Susan Glaspell's Drama of Resistance,” Jouve turns away from the playwright's manipulation of time and space, and attends to each work's female protagonists in relation to Brustein's and Camus's notions of the rebel. Labeling Glaspell a “writer-reformer” (166), Jouve identifies three types of heroine: idealists who revolt as civic activists; “individualist rebels” who strive toward a democratic ideal out of self-interest (126–7); and a Nietzschean “Superwoman” (143) whose attempts to secure freedom end in tragedy. Chapter 4 focuses on ways in which Glaspell's characters resist national hypocrisy through their democratic idealism in The People (1917), Inheritors, and Springs Eternal (1943). Although Jouve limits her analysis to Glaspell's drama and not production history, her inclusion of the Hedgerow Theatre's suspension of their annual production of Inheritors in 1941 to support the war effort—per Glaspell's request—heightens the stakes outlined in the chapter. Chapter 5 examines those rebels who stand on the margins of the community and advocate for an apolitical agenda in The Outside (1917), Alison's House, and the unpublished one-act Wings. Notably, this is the first book to provide a substantial analysis of Wings. In Chapter 6, Jouve argues that Claire from The Verge (1921) figures as an “extreme form of individualism” where otherness stands as a desirable end (143). There's a delicate balance at work here between pathologizing the character's “radical feminism” (143) and locating her literary antecedents among many influences: Freud's Dora, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nietzsche's “Superman,” and Gilbert and Gubar's “madwoman.” By focusing on these potential influences as well as the play's critical literature, this chapter provides a rich character study that epitomizes the contradictions inherent in Glaspell's rebel idealists.

By Part III, “Susan Glaspell's Drama of Hope,” the analysis has departed from Brustein's claim that modernist writers “confine themselves to denouncing the degradation of human values” (17). Jouve points out that Glaspell's theatre offers a reconstruction process through collaboration. By staging “positive revolt, and therefore a drama of hope” (17), Glaspell defies Brustein's vision of modern drama. Chapter 7 traces the subversions made possible through modalities of kinship in Trifles and The Outside. Rather than suggest that sisterhood fosters passive resistance under patriarchy, Jouve argues that an “awakening to a sense of shared experience” (169) allows the women in Glaspell's plays to resist authority actively through acts of concealment. In Chapter 8, Jouve applies the Emersonian notion of solidarity to her analysis of Inheritors and Springs Eternal. In particular, she finds that the metaliterary commentary brought forth by the artist characters in these plays reveals the playwright's belief that the artist serves her audience as a “democratic avatar” (202). Chapter 9 serves as a counterpoint to scholars who see Bernice (1919) and Chains of Dew (1922) as evincing a compromised feminist politics because the plays’ protagonists sacrifice their own agendas for their husbands’. Jouve instead claims that Glaspell presents spectators with “covert strategies to undermine the oppressive structures from within” (204). Touching on the compromises made between Glaspell and George Cram Cook, this chapter, more so than the others, brokers its argument on the second-wave feminist mantra that the personal is political.

By pointing out how Glaspell figures in American modern drama as a “writer-reformer” (166), Jouve corrects Brustein's singling out of O'Neill as “the forefather of the theatre of revolt” (15), as Glaspell's writings were still obscured when The Theatre of Revolt appeared in 1962. However, the return to Brustein's text as a way to organize the book, although appropriate, yields fewer returns as the analysis progresses. Throughout, Jouve also underscores writing as a transgressive act for women in the public and domestic spheres. The book proves most politically urgent from this position, as it signals the continued investment among scholars in the relationship between the artist's politics and poetics.