Although a number of scholars (J. Ellen Gainor, Marcia Noe, and Klaus Schwank, among others) have recognized Susan Glaspell's masterful utilization of stage space and the important relationships among location, action, and character in her plays, Noelia Hernando-Real's Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell is the first full-length—and by far the most comprehensive—treatment of this fruitful theme. The author's purpose is to offer “a deep analysis of Glaspell's onstage places and the relationships she establishes between these places, the dramatic development of her plays, and her usually pent-up characters” (9). Her analysis is focused primarily, although not exclusively, through Una Chaudhuri's concept of geopathology, in which the “action relies heavily on the configuration of characters as victims of location and on their need to escape” (9), a theoretical framework that serves her purpose extremely well.

The study is organized thematically, each chapter treating one or more aspects of geopathology rather than individual plays. This choice allows for surprisingly in-depth consideration of eleven of the fifteen plays in Glaspell's repertory, with some attention to the remaining four and occasional references to her fiction. Hernando-Real devotes most of her first chapter to a helpful overview of relevant terms and concepts, including Gay McAuley's explications of how theatre space functions as dramaturgy and of proxemic relations among space, objects, characters, and movement (15–16); feminist analyses (by, for example, Virginia Woolf and Judith Butler) of the relationship between gender and space; and, especially, Chaudhuri's concepts of “geopathology,” “victimage of location,” and “heroism of departure” (18), and the key images and themes that manifest in a “geopathic home,” including “generation confrontations, alcoholism, garbage, the destruction of nature, and the buried child” (28).

Chapter 2, “American Geomythologies Revisited as Part of Dramatic Geopathology,” explores how Glaspell exposes the American myth of mobility as “an appalling lie” (32), especially for female characters trapped in geopathic stage spaces in plays such as Trifles, Chains of Dew, Alison's House, and The Outside. The following chapter, “Geodichotomies in the Configuration of Dramatic Geopathology,” continues this exploration with attention to the geographical dichotomies that configure these geopathic locations (isolation–community, prison–shelter, inside–outside). Hernando-Real points out, for example, the recurring prison imagery throughout Glaspell's dramaturgy (in Trifles, the farmhouse, the birdcage, and the literal prison in which Minnie Wright is held; in The Verge, the frequent references to keys and locks, and circles as metaphors for entrapment). She also notes the resemblance of The Verge's downstairs room, accessible only through a trap door, to Hell in medieval morality plays (79), and the correspondence of the carefully described lantern in The Verge's tower, through which beams of light escape their metal casing through “pricks and slits in the metal,” to protagonist Claire Archer's efforts to escape social and familial convention (Glaspell, quoted on 78).

In Chapter 4, “The Burden of the Past in Dramatic Geopathology,” Hernando-Real examines how Glaspell's depiction of the past can function as a “spatial burden for some characters” (92), leading to generational conflicts in plays such as Inheritors, which spans three generations, and Close the Book, which portrays how members of the (suggestively named) Root family seek within their family history support for their conflicting self-images. She points out the recurrence within Glaspell's dramaturgy of the spatial burden of both the pioneer and the Pilgrim Fathers’ heritages, invoked through dialogue (for example, by Grandmother Morton's recollections in Inheritors, and by Claire Archer's rejection of the “great teachers and preachers” she came from in The Verge [Glaspell, quoted on 98]), and through visual images (including the portraits of Revolutionary War ancestors and the genealogical tome in Close the Book, and Eleanor's two-hundred-year-old ancestral home with its “old American” furniture in The Comic Artist [Glaspell, quoted on 99]).

In Chapter 5, “Imagery of Death in Dramatic Geopathology,” Hernando-Real explores this fascinating and relatively overlooked aspect of Glaspell's dramaturgy, demonstrating that “[t]he presence of death is palpable in almost every play by Susan Glaspell” (114). There are corpses onstage (or just off) in, for example, Bernice, The Outside, Alison's House, The Verge, and The Comic Artist. A corpse has just been removed from an unseen room in Trifles, and images of death occur in even the (more or less) comic Chains of Dew. The buried child motif (references to dead or unborn children) haunts Trifles, The Verge, Inheritors, Bernice, and Chains of Dew. Glaspell's portrayal of war is a subtheme within this chapter, in which Hernando-Real notes that Glaspell brings onstage the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Black Hawk War, the Hungarian Revolution, the anticolonial movement in India, and both World Wars, situating war as conflict over space (127), and images of war as provoking “a sense of paralysis in the onstage characters” (129).

Hernando-Real's final chapter, “Dramatic Principles of Departure,” considers what the author identifies as the mission shared by all of Glaspell's geopathic characters (in common with many characters in modern drama): escape from the “victimage of location.” The various means by which they accomplish this mission include art (Mother's doll making in Chains of Dew; Alison's poetry in Alison's House), nature (The People's Woman from Idaho), and the “heroism of departure” (146). Elsa in Alison's House, for example, leaves the ancestral home with her lover. Trifle's Minnie Wright and Inheritor's Madeline Morton leave their homes for prisons. Bernice makes use of her death to “exert her power over the other characters” (149). The Verge's Claire Archer escapes through insanity; Chains of Dew's Dotty enacts a metaphorical “departure” by reshaping her environment, as well as changing herself physically to fit her evolving identity. Hernando-Real sees all these means of departure as liberatory—a debatable perspective, but one that she presents with persuasive authority.

Throughout this meticulously researched and well-written study, Hernando-Real's attention to detail mirrors that of Glaspell's two most noted female characters, the farmwomen of Trifles, whose perceptive readings of geopathic space inspire their “departure” from patriarchal law in aid of their neighbor's escape. Enhanced by eleven recent production photos and an extensive bibliography of Glaspell's works, Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell will be of significant interest to anyone desiring a deeper understanding of Glaspell's plays as well as the cultural and historical issues manifested within her dramaturgy.