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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In her compelling novel "Fidelity," Susan Glaspell explores the intricate interplay of love, betrayal, and societal expectations through deft prose and nuanced characterization. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century America, the narrative unfolds with emotional intensity, as characters grapple with their desires and the moral dilemmas posed by fidelity in relationships. Glaspell employs a descriptive and psychologically astute style, echoing the modernist themes of her contemporaries while carving her own distinctive voice that probes the depths of human emotion. Susan Glaspell, a pioneering figure in American literature and a prominent voice in the suffrage movement, draws upon her own experiences and observations of rural Midwestern life to inform her work. Her background as a playwright and actress also lends a dramatic edge to her storytelling. "Fidelity," written at a time when women's roles were evolving, encapsulates her keen insights into the social fabric of her time and the struggles for women to assert agency within personal and societal constraints. This novel is a must-read for those interested in feminist literature and the complexities of human relationships. Glaspell's attention to the subtleties of psychological conflict invites readers to reflect on their own beliefs about love and fidelity, making "Fidelity" a timeless examination of the human condition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Fidelity
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fidelity asks what it truly means to be faithful, to others, to a community, or to one's own conscience. In this novel, Susan Glaspell examines the costs of conviction and the pressures that shape personal choice. Known for her incisive dramas, she brings the same clarity to a story rooted in everyday life, where loyalty becomes a testing ground rather than a simple virtue. Without sensationalism, the book opens a moral conversation that resists easy resolutions, inviting readers to observe how love, duty, and self-respect come into conflict and how a society's judgments can harden into fate.
A realist social and psychological novel set in a small Midwestern American town in the early twentieth century, Fidelity was first published in the mid-1910s, during a period of intense debate about marriage, gender roles, and personal freedom in the United States. Glaspell's background as a journalist and playwright informs the novel's attentive observation of community life. The setting is not merely backdrop but an active force, where habits, reputations, and expectations govern behavior. The atmosphere is provincial yet complex, and the time frame predates nationwide women's suffrage, amplifying the stakes for a woman who challenges dominant norms.
At its core, the narrative follows a young woman who returns home after years away, carrying the mark of a choice that the town has judged unforgivable. Her arrival disturbs a carefully maintained social equilibrium: parents, old friends, and former admirers must decide whether affection can survive public censure. The novel does not revolve around mystery or melodrama; instead, it traces the emotional texture of encounters, silences, and conversations. Readers can expect a measured pace, closely observed character dynamics, and a mood that is contemplative rather than punitive, allowing the initial scandal to serve as lens, not spectacle.
Glaspell writes with poise and moral curiosity, foregrounding interior motive and the pressures exerted by collective opinion. Dialogue feels natural and restrained, while description accrues meaning through small details of houses, streets, and routines. The effect is to render the town as a moral ecosystem, one that both sustains and constrains the people who inhabit it. Without prescribing answers, the narrative weighs competing claims of obligation: to parents who fear disgrace, to partners who expect constancy, and to the self that seeks integrity. The language is lucid, the judgment patient, the dramatic stakes quietly but steadily intensifying.
The title signals the book's principal inquiry: fidelity as a contested value that changes shape depending on where one stands. Glaspell probes gendered double standards, the social costs of nonconformity, and the difference between private ethics and public reputation. She shows how gossip operates as a form of governance, distributing reward and punishment, and how affection can harden into rule. Yet compassion is never far away; even characters who condemn are given human motives and fears. The result is a portrait of community that avoids caricature, asking whether fairness is possible when loyalty is defined by conformity.
Contemporary readers may recognize in this early twentieth-century story the enduring dynamics of judgment, belonging, and autonomy. Questions that animate current discourse about the policing of intimacy, the limits of communal authority, and what we owe to ourselves versus to others are threaded through the book. The novel speaks to anyone interested in feminist literary history, American realism, or the ethics of care and responsibility. It offers a space to consider how reputations are made and remade, how courage can look like betrayal, and how empathy might widen the circle of what a community can accept. Its questions linger long after the final page.
Reading Fidelity is less an encounter with plot twists than an immersion in moral atmosphere, where each choice resonates across households and years. The experience is reflective and quietly gripping, rewarding close attention to nuance. Glaspell's steady gaze makes the familiar terrain of small-town life feel newly consequential, and her restraint leaves room for readers to deliberate alongside the characters. For those who value novels that test convictions without preaching, this work offers a compelling meditation on love, duty, and self-determination, an invitation to consider what lasting faithfulness could mean in private lives and public worlds.
Synopsis
Fidelity opens with Ruth Holland returning to her Midwestern hometown after years away, summoned by news of her father’s grave illness. Her arrival revives a scandal that once defined the town’s opinion of her: she had defied community expectations by leaving with a man she loved, a choice viewed as a public affront to family and custom. The narrative establishes the small town’s tightly woven social fabric, where church, business, and family overlap. Ruth’s presence exposes unspoken tensions and old loyalties, while the immediate practical matter of seeing her father sets the story’s urgent, intimate frame and initiates a series of measured encounters.
The novel steps back to outline the past that made Ruth an emblem of controversy. Years earlier, she fell in love with a man whose circumstances challenged prevailing moral codes, and she chose that love despite pleas to preserve appearances. The community read her decision as betrayal, and her family bore the stigma. Glaspell presents the essential conflict without sensational detail, emphasizing the consequences: broken expectations, social penalties, and an enduring question about what fidelity truly demands. As Ruth’s life unfolded away from home, her absence hardened local opinion, even as she and her partner built a private existence beyond the town’s authority.
In the present, Ruth’s return is cautious and deliberate. She must navigate the practicalities of lodging, visits, and public visibility in a place where each step is noted. Her brother and other family members negotiate between protection and propriety, mindful of what neighbors might say yet aware of a daughter’s claim on a dying parent. Glaspell renders everyday interactions—doorways, parlors, hospital corridors—as sites of silent judgment or surprise sympathy. Ruth keeps her focus on seeing her father, acknowledging the pain her choices caused while refusing to disavow them. The tone is restrained, attending to small gestures that reveal shifting allegiances.
Ruth’s meetings with people from her past trace the town’s range of responses. A former suitor, now established and respected, embodies the path she once rejected, and their conversation revisits youthful plans with the distance of experience. Old friends, now spouses and parents, weigh compassion against caution, revealing how reputation shapes opportunity. Women she once knew engage her with curiosity or reserve, their attitudes reflecting both personal feeling and communal scripts. Through these exchanges, the novel highlights how individuals internalize the town’s codes, and how affection, regret, and duty can coexist without resolving into simple blame or vindication.
Public life continues around Ruth as civic rituals and institutions assert their influence. Church services, club meetings, and newspaper opinions provide the moral soundtrack of the community, articulating ideals of loyalty, marriage, and social harmony. Glaspell shows how these voices define acceptable conduct and translate private decisions into public meaning. Ruth’s case becomes a touchstone in conversations about responsibility and forgiveness, sometimes used to affirm consensus, sometimes to question it. Without staging overt debate, the narrative lets sermons, editorials, and polite talk build a portrait of a society confident in its rules yet unsettled when those rules are tested by lived complexity.
Alongside public scrutiny, the novel dwells in quiet moments that illuminate Ruth’s inner landscape. Walks through familiar streets and memories of earlier seasons prompt reflections on time, growth, and the costs of choice. Letters and news from the man she loves mark the continuing reality of that relationship and the obligations it entails. Glaspell frames Ruth’s self-assessment not as confession but as clarity: a sober inventory of what she has gained and lost. The prose favors understatement, letting small recollections and restrained dialogue convey the weight of years, while carefully linking past and present to show how one illuminates the other.
The family crisis intensifies as her father’s condition changes, compressing social tensions into immediate decisions. Practical matters—visits, caregiving, and arrangements—force relatives and acquaintances to declare themselves through action rather than opinion. A public encounter, charged by rumor and memory, crystallizes what is at stake for Ruth: competing claims of family, community, and the life she has chosen. Without dramatizing scandal, the narrative marks a turning point where postponement is no longer possible. Counsel from different quarters presses in, each invoking a version of fidelity—duty to kin, obedience to custom, or integrity to one’s own commitments.
The story builds toward a choice shaped by everything that has come before. Ruth measures her responsibility to those who raised her against the promises that define her present. The decision she reaches is presented without sensational revelation, stressing consequences more than spectacle. Relationships are altered, some strained and others unexpectedly mended, as people respond in ways that complicate easy judgments. Glaspell maintains a balanced perspective, showing that outcomes in such matters rarely satisfy all expectations. The closing movement emphasizes acceptance, acknowledging both loss and continuity, while leaving room for the reader to infer how private strength sustains a life beyond public verdicts.
Fidelity concludes by clarifying its central idea: fidelity is larger than a single rule or social vow. It encompasses loyalty to persons, to truth, and to the self, and the novel explores how these obligations can align or collide. Through Ruth’s return and departure from old certainties, Glaspell portrays a community learning, in small increments, to see beyond appearances. The narrative neither indicts nor absolves; it records the pressures of a time and place where reputation carries weight, and where compassion can subtly revise tradition. The result is a portrait of moral complexity conveyed through ordinary lives, measured choices, and enduring ties.
Historical Context
Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity (1915) is set in a small Midwestern town closely modeled on Davenport, Iowa, where she grew up. The novel spans the early 1900s through the 1910s, a period when telephones, interurban railways, and mass-circulation newspapers connected provincial communities to national debates while churches, clubs, and kin networks still enforced local conformity. The town’s economy mixes professional classes, merchants, and farmers tied to regional markets via the Rock Island and Burlington rail lines. This setting captures the tension between modern mobility and entrenched moral codes, foregrounding how reputation, church influence, and neighborly surveillance defined a woman’s options at the height of the Progressive Era.
The U.S. women’s suffrage movement, cresting between the 1890s and 1920, forms a decisive backdrop. In Iowa, native daughter Carrie Chapman Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association, launching the “Winning Plan” in 1916. Western states advanced faster—Washington (1910), California (1911), Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas (1912), Illinois partial suffrage (1913), Montana and Nevada (1914)—while Iowa’s statewide referendum narrowly failed on June 5, 1916, before national victory with the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified 1920). Fidelity reflects these debates by dramatizing a woman claiming moral agency against communal judgment; the heroine’s insistence on self-determination echoes suffrage-era arguments that women, as full citizens, must exercise conscience over convention.
Progressive-era social purity campaigns shaped law and custom around sexuality and marriage. The federal Comstock Act (1873) criminalized mailing “obscene” materials, including contraceptive information, and the Mann Act (White-Slave Traffic Act, 1910) policed interstate transport for “immoral purposes,” often used expansively against consensual relationships. Divorce remained restrictive; many sought relief in “divorce colonies” such as Sioux Falls, South Dakota (notorious in the 1890s until residency rules tightened in 1909) or Reno, Nevada (residency reduced to six months in 1909). Fidelity mirrors these pressures in its portrait of social ostracism for a woman who violates marital norms; the novel scrutinizes the legal-moral apparatus that punished female desire more harshly than male conduct.
Temperance activism, led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (1893), suffused Midwestern public life, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) and the Volstead Act (1919). In Iowa, strong dry sentiment produced county-by-county crackdowns well before national Prohibition, with churches and civic groups treating alcohol as a proxy for moral order. Though Fidelity is not a “temperance novel,” its small-town world reflects the same surveillance networks—pastors, clubwomen, editors—capable of enforcing social discipline. The moral unanimity that shuts doors on the protagonist resembles temperance-era mechanisms of shaming and boycott, revealing how reformist zeal could entrench conformity and punish individuals who deviated from prescribed domestic and sexual codes.
Progressive reform reshaped civic expectations, especially for women. Jane Addams founded Hull-House in Chicago in 1889; the U.S.’s first juvenile court opened in Cook County in 1899; national regulatory milestones included the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). Clubwomen’s federations in Iowa towns organized lectures, charity, and civic campaigns, building female public authority before formal enfranchisement. The University of Iowa had admitted women since 1855, producing teachers, journalists, and professionals who circulated new ideas across the state. Fidelity registers this ferment: its conflicts arise where educated, mobile women meet communities that privilege reputation over inquiry. The heroine’s moral reasoning—tested against social cost—echoes Progressive claims that conscience and social science should revise inherited custom.
Modern transportation and communications intensified the pull between local belonging and urban opportunity. By 1910 the United States had about 8.7 million telephones; rural free delivery (nationally expanded after 1896) and daily trains tied Iowa towns to Chicago’s markets and culture. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific lines and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy carried travelers, mail, and newspapers that brought metropolitan norms into parlor discussions. This infrastructure enabled departures and returns—the key motions in Fidelity. The novel’s plot of leaving a town and later reentering it depends on such mobility, while its depiction of gossip spreading swiftly through offices, parlors, and churches reflects how wires and rails accelerated judgment as much as they broadened horizons.
Glaspell’s own milieu illuminates the book’s social critique. Her relationship with George Cram Cook—divorced and then married to her in 1913—provoked scandal in Davenport, pushing the couple toward New York’s Greenwich Village, where radical debates about marriage and “free love” flourished. The Liberal Club, Heterodoxy (founded 1912 by Marie Jenney Howe), and the socialist magazine The Masses (edited by Max Eastman from 1912) advanced feminist and sexual autonomy arguments; in 1915 Glaspell and Cook helped found the Provincetown Players. Fidelity translates these currents into Midwestern terms: it tests whether a woman’s loyalty to self and partner can be ethically sustained against communal law. The pressure-cooker small town becomes a diagnostic instrument for national arguments about private conscience.
Fidelity functions as a social critique by exposing the gendered double standard, the fusion of religious authority with civic exclusion, and the punitive edge of reformist moralism. It interrogates how communities conflate legality with virtue and reputation with truth, revealing class and clerical actors who police female behavior while excusing male prerogatives. By situating a woman’s ethical choice within Progressive-era debates over citizenship, purity, and reform, the book challenges the era’s failure to extend its humanitarian rhetoric to intimate life. Its portrait of ostracism—bankers, ministers, and club leaders closing ranks—indicts small-town power structures and anticipates the constitutional expansion of women’s rights that would soon destabilize such local regimes.
