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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Lifted Masks: Stories," Susan Glaspell weaves together a collection of poignant narratives that probe the complexities of human emotions and societal conventions in early 20th-century America. Employing a modernist literary style characterized by its psychological depth and vivid imagery, Glaspell captures the nuances of her characters' inner lives, often challenging traditional gender roles and exploring themes of identity, repression, and aspiration. The stories collectively create a tapestry that reflects the struggles of women during a time of significant social upheaval, revealing the masks they wear to navigate their realities. Susan Glaspell, a pioneer of feminist literature and a leading figure of the Chicago Renaissance, drew inspiration from her own experiences as a woman in a male-dominated society. Her background as a playwright and co-founder of the Provincetown Players profoundly influenced her narrative approach, blending sharp dialogue with rich character development. This distinct voice elucidates the challenges of her era, making her work resonant and relevant in discussions of women's rights and social justice. "Lifted Masks" is an essential read for those interested in early feminist literature and the intricate dynamics of societal roles. Glaspell's insightful storytelling and innovative technique leave a lasting impact, inviting readers to reflect on their own masks and the societal expectations they confront. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Lifted Masks; stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
Lifted Masks; stories presents a single-author gathering of short fiction by Susan Glaspell, bringing together a focused cross-section of her prose work. The collection’s purpose is to highlight the breadth of Glaspell’s narrative art in compact form, inviting readers to encounter the concerns and craft that also animated her wider career. Read as a whole, these stories offer an incisive portrait of American life in the early twentieth century, while foregrounding questions of perception and responsibility that remain urgent. The volume is conceived not as a complete corpus, but as a coherent showcase of voices, situations, and moral inquiries unified by a distinctive sensibility.
This volume consists of short stories exclusively. Within that single form, however, Glaspell explores a notable range: domestic and urban realism, satiric and gently comic observation, psychological portraiture, and socially oriented encounters that test characters’ values. Some narratives move with the economy and tension associated with the one-act structure, while others unfold as reflective sketches shaped by close attention to voice and mood. There are no poems, plays, essays, or letters here—only prose fiction—yet the variety of tone and vantage point within these stories demonstrates how elastic the short story can be when used to examine character, conscience, and community.
A unifying idea runs through the collection’s title: masks, the faces people present to the world, and the moments when those coverings lift. The stories examine American ideals in friction with lived realities, often placing an individual at the threshold between private conviction and public expectation. Questions of belonging and estrangement recur, as do encounters between newcomers and established communities. Glaspell is interested in how sympathy is tested, how responsibility shifts when one truly sees another, and how ordinary circumstances can reveal ethical fault lines. The result is a sequence of narratives that probe identity, agency, and the costs of self-knowledge.
Stylistically, Glaspell favors clarity, restraint, and a dramatic sense of timing. Scenes develop through implication as much as statement, with subtext carried in gesture, silence, and carefully weighted dialogue. Settings—Midwestern streets, coastal cities, interiors where strangers meet—are evoked with economical detail that serves character and theme. The point of view is typically tight and discriminating, allowing readers to inhabit a sensibility without being told what to think. Irony is present but seldom showy; sentiment appears, yet is tempered by observation. Across the collection, compression and nuance work together, producing stories that invite reflection long after the final line.
These stories arise from the milieu of early twentieth-century American letters, when magazines and books circulated new fiction to a wide readership and writers tested forms suited to changing social realities. Lifted Masks; stories can be situated within that publication context: it offers prose shaped by a period marked by urban growth, reformist energies, and transatlantic movement. As such, the collection illuminates how Glaspell’s fiction converses with the culture in which it first appeared, while revealing concerns—justice, empathy, and civic imagination—that link her work across genres. Readers thus meet an author attentive to both the moment and the enduring questions beneath it.
Taken together, the stories matter not only for their historical placement but for their continuing resonance. Glaspell’s characters confront choices that pivot on recognition: how to act when one’s idea of America collides with another’s experience; how to balance personal loyalty with social obligation; how to translate feeling into just conduct. The prose is accessible yet layered, rewarding both first reading and return visits. By combining moral seriousness with narrative poise, the collection models a short story tradition that is alert to consequence without abandoning curiosity or compassion. Its concerns—identity, fairness, community—remain as pressing today as when first published.
Readers approaching this collection may wish to notice how tones and angles of vision shift from story to story while the inquiries persist. A quiet sketch gives way to a sharper social study; a comic note opens into a serious reckoning; a chance meeting becomes a test of principle. Without foreclosing outcomes, Glaspell builds situations that clarify what is at stake in everyday choices. The cumulative effect is of masks lifting in varied light, revealing faces that are particular and yet recognizably human. As an introduction to her short fiction, this volume offers a sustained encounter with a writer of scope and conscience.
Historical Context
Born in 1876 in Davenport, Iowa, Susan Glaspell emerged from the Progressive Era’s ferment, a milieu that shaped the social conscience running through Lifted Masks (1912). Educated at Drake University and reporting for the Des Moines Daily News from 1899 to 1901, she honed an investigative eye for injustice and moral ambiguity. That journalistic discipline undergirds the collection’s attention to motive, law, and empathy. The book stands at a hinge in her career: it gathers stories written as she moved from Midwestern realism toward experimental modernism, a trajectory that would soon carry her to New York’s avant-garde and the Provincetown Players, whose founding in 1915 cemented her national profile.
The Progressive Era’s reformist currents—women’s suffrage, settlement work, and debates over professional roles—suffuse Glaspell’s portraits of aspiration and constraint. The rise of the “New Woman,” visible in cities from Chicago to New York between the 1890s and 1910s, expanded opportunities in clerical labor, journalism, and teaching, while provoking backlash rooted in traditional gender codes. Jane Addams’s Hull-House (Chicago, 1889) and reformers such as Florence Kelley modeled a public ethics of care that informs Glaspell’s recurrent sympathy for the vulnerable. When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, it fulfilled political hopes long present in these stories, which probe the costs and possibilities of female autonomy in a rapidly modernizing society.
Questions of belonging, citizenship, and cosmopolitan encounter—vital in the decades of peak immigration from 1900 to 1914—give Lifted Masks a transatlantic resonance. Ellis Island (opened 1892) processed millions who reshaped American cities, while nativist “Americanization” campaigns sought to discipline language, labor, and custom. Glaspell’s fiction often stages that friction: immigrant striving, the allure and perplexity of the United States to Europeans, and the self-fashioning of newcomers. Public fascination with visiting dignitaries, typified by Prince Henry of Prussia’s 1902 tour, fed cultural debates about Old World hierarchy versus New World democracy—debates echoed in stories that juxtapose European expectation with American improvisation, humor, and impatience with deference.
Labor conflict and radical politics—central to national life from the Haymarket memory (Chicago, 1886) to the Industrial Workers of the World’s founding (Chicago, 1905)—form a crucial backdrop. The LA Times bombing (1910), the Anarchist Exclusion Act (1903), and public figures like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman kept anarchism in headlines, while the Lawrence textile strike (1912) dramatized industrial inequities. Glaspell’s stories weigh sympathy against fear, asking how justice is defined when class anger collides with law. They also reflect Midwestern and Village debates over free speech, advocacy, and state power, conversations that would intensify during the 1910s as courts and journalists tested the limits of dissent.
The looming Great War recast American conversation about loyalty, surveillance, and sacrifice. Although Lifted Masks appeared in 1912, Glaspell’s career soon intersected with wartime pressures: the Espionage Act (1917), the Sedition Act (1918), and the propaganda of the Committee on Public Information under George Creel. Her fiction’s moral puzzles—mercy versus punishment, suspicion versus trust, private conscience versus public order—anticipate dilemmas sharpened by war. Moments of compressed time, border-crossing identities, and the ethics of witnessing echo the era’s anxiety about imminent rupture. The stories’ sensitivity to overheard speech, coded behavior, and ambiguous motives mirrors a culture learning to read strangers under the shadow of global conflict.
Glaspell’s artistic evolution unfolded within early American modernism. In 1915 she co-founded the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts with George Cram Cook, nurturing experimental dramaturgy and the early work of Eugene O’Neill. Simultaneously, Greenwich Village bohemia—the Masses (1911–1917) edited by Max Eastman, salons hosted by Mabel Dodge, and the feminist Heterodoxy club (founded 1912)—advanced free expression, sexual autonomy, and political critique. Friends and fellow Midwestern émigrés like Floyd Dell bridged Davenport and the Village. Though the stories predate much of her theater, their irony, shifting focalization, and psychological inquiry anticipate the stagecraft Glaspell developed, culminating in later accolades such as the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House.
Midwestern regionalism anchors Glaspell’s sensibility: the Mississippi River at Davenport, county-seat courthouses, and prairie horizons inflect her treatment of memory, duty, and rebellion. The nation’s swift urbanization around 1900—rail networks, electrified streets, office towers—pulls her characters between small-town intimacy and metropolitan anonymity. The Chicago literary renaissance (with figures like Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson) and reform reportage following Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) created a climate valuing unflinching social observation. Economic shocks such as the Panic of 1907 and the persistent afterlife of 1890s Populism color anxieties about credit, merit, and fairness. In this landscape, youthful striving collides with inherited codes and the moral ambiguities of modern work.
The early twentieth-century short story marketplace shaped how Glaspell wrote and was read. National magazines—Harper’s, McClure’s, Century, the Saturday Evening Post—courted socially observant fiction, while little magazines fostered formal risk. Editors influenced pacing, length, and topicality, rewarding acute scenes of urban life, immigrant encounter, and courtroom or newsroom drama. Realist legacies from William Dean Howells and Henry James blended with pragmatist psychology (William James’s 1902 lectures) and emerging psychoanalysis to encourage interiority and ethical ambiguity. Copyright reform (1909) and postal debates affected circulation, yet the appetite for compact narratives of civic conflict and private conscience ensured a receptive audience for Glaspell’s layered, reform-era stories.
Synopsis (Selection)
ONE OF THOSE IMPOSSIBLE AMERICANS
An outspoken American abroad unsettles a refined European circle, and a small crisis tests assumptions on both sides about bluntness, sincerity, and manners.
THE PLEA
In a case that pits legal form against human need, an unexpected appeal forces those involved to reckon with mercy, pride, and the costs of being right.
FOR LOVE OF THE HILLS
Two urban exiles bound by homesickness for the hills of their past find their lives quietly linked by a modest act of generosity and recognition.
FRECKLES M'GRATH
A scrappy street boy’s brush with trouble becomes a test of loyalty and class, revealing the stubborn code that governs his world.
FROM A TO Z
A young woman caught in the alphabetized routine of a big office glimpses a larger life through a chance connection with a would-be writer and must decide what she values.
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD
Those who worship a public figure confront the flawed reality of the man himself, blurring the line between ideal and human truth.
HOW THE PRINCE SAW AMERICA
Traveling incognito, a European prince tours the United States and discovers, beyond spectacle and bravado, an everyday democracy that unsettles and attracts him.
THE LAST SIXTY MINUTES
As the clock runs down on an irrevocable decision, the principals—under guard, at home, and in official rooms—struggle with duty, love, and the possibility of reprieve.
OUT THERE
An insulated bystander is pulled into a crisis on the city’s margins, discovering a responsibility to strangers that cannot be kept at arm’s length.
THE PREPOSTEROUS MOTIVE
A puzzling action that looks too foolish to be true is traced to a motive at once absurd and deeply human, confounding tidy explanations.
HIS AMERICA
A man who has long imagined his own version of the country returns to test it against reality, finding that belonging is personal, partial, and earned.
THE ANARCHIST: HIS DOG
A hunted radical takes in a stray dog, and the animal’s unasked-for loyalty complicates his hard creed during a tense encounter with polite society and the law.
AT TWILIGHT
In the last light of day, aging characters revisit old choices and strained bonds, edging toward a quiet, provisional peace.
