Susan Glaspell(1876-1948), the representative female playwright in the history of the American theatre, has generated critical debates and drawn critical attention not only as the contemporary writer and colleague of Eugene O’Neill but also as a great female writer. Although she has been drawing feminists’ attention since her first inclusion in literary cannon in the 1980s, Glaspell still remains relatively on the margin of the critical studies and debates. This paper, focusing on Glaspell’s Bernice and Alison’s House, aims to restore the interests in her works and provoke more studies about her and her works by discussing Glaspell’s ‘aesthetics of absence’ and her absent heroines who are already dead.
Bernice and Alison’s House both show the whole process of exploring and constructing the identity of each absent heroine, whose ‘absent presence’ overwhelms the other living characters as the center of the stage. Giving more power to absence and silence than to presence and speech, both plays contain Glaspell’s strategy of paradox as her attempt to demolish the established gender-based system and to ‘make’ new orders and new values. Part Ⅰ explores general characteristics of Glaspell’s ‘aesthetics of absence’ and her device of the absent heroine. Part Ⅱ discusses the constructing process of Bernice’s identity and the significance of Bernice’s lie in terms of power, and examines how Bernice disrupts the myth of ‘the angel of the house’ by exercising power over her husband with her lie rather than the truth. Part Ⅲ examines Alison’s problematic unpublished love poems about her forbidden love and how her works provoke debates about the ownership of artistic work. The involvement of male power in editing, publishing, and evaluating female writer’s works is also discussed. With Alison serving as the representative of female writers, and her house and her room serving as “a room of one’s own” for female writers, Glaspell raises questions about the absent female writers and their authorship. Finally, Glaspell achieves the paradox beyond the grave by highlighting how Bernice through her lie and Alison through her unpublished love poetry take presence to the people living, exercising their power beyond their death. Like her absent heroines, Glaspell herself, being absent for a while in the history of the theatre, goes beyond her absence and death, requesting her place in the literary history as a writer who deserves ‘constant and persistent’ critical studies.