12/15/2000

With the great success of Susan Glaspell's short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and the dramatic version, "Trifles," it would be logical to expect that an examination of her other works would follow. But with the reissue of her novel, Fidelity (Persephone Press, 1999), no thunderous reaction seems as yet to have ensued. To some extent, this silence has been due to the same reasons for the critical silence that originally greeted "Trifles." Because Glaspell deals with the momentous significance of the apparently trivial, it is difficult to discover a key to the import of her use of apparent nonessential events for significant ends. It is as if a decoder is needed to grasp what exactly is unique and timely here about her use of well-known situations, and to transcend the seeming banality of the subject. For as with "Trifles," Glaspell's materials are the common and apparently simple in Fidelity, and she uses the generic language of the trivial and banal.

In the case of "Trifles," the details of life, that accumulation of insignificant trivia, reveal the basic framework of the familial relationship and ultimately explain the cause of this family violence that led to murder. In the case of Fidelity it is also in the apparently arbitrary and superficial behavior of the characters that an understanding of the opportunities and responsibilities of the individual in the structure and philosophy of society can be found. Glaspell's plot may initially be seen as banal, remote, and outdated by the modern reader, one to be relegated to the world of melodrama.

Ruth Holland, the heroine of a mid-west small town, ruins the lives of her family, the man who loves her, and her own life, when she runs off with a respectable married man. And if this is the entire plot -- the frustrated reader may add -- why must it be complicated by the extended points of view of Deane Franklin, the young doctor who loved her and aided her elopement? Why is there not a more modern probing of the inner life of the lovers and their shadowy relationship? Why does the story digress to numerous subplots, including experiences of the heroine's younger brother, the wronged woman's development, the hard life of an old school mate who befriends her, the moral choices of a younger neighbor, the apparently easy life of the schoolmate who is forced by the mother to deny her beloved but wrong friend? Why are there so many elements that do not tie up together in a neat little plot at the end? And why is the conclusion of the novel so open-ended, with Ruth Holland deciding to leave for New York on her own without the now-eligible lover who would have married her?

But the absence of focus on the romantic feelings of the heroine in a seemingly romantic novel is precisely the point, because romance, so central to life in the usual woman's novel, is the first thing that disintegrates in all the romantic relationships depicted here. The opening idyll of the honeymoon of Deane Franklin, who has brought his happy bride home to his town where she is warmly welcomed, is soon ended by the ideological difference that emerges between the two newlyweds, when Deane insists upon defending the unconventional behavior of his ostracized friend Ruth. The passionate love of Ruth and her married lover, Stuart Williams, for which both abandoned society, soon fades into the background as the basis of their relationship becomes their shared exclusion from the rest of the world. The representative of the newer generation, the young neighbor, Mildred, who had considered Ruth her role model, and perceives her life as promising new alternatives, is quickly discouraged from following her heart and flaunting society by no other than Ruth herself. No one, in fact, is really in love when the events of this novel about love take place.

This absence of a sentimental core is, however, not a failure, but an indication of a different basis for the novel. The basic inquiry of Fidelity is not love, but the concept of the social contract, as developed by the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and as central to the concept of American democracy. What is the basis of our society -- why do we come together and what keeps us together? And what is the degree of obligation of the individual to society and the degree of the responsibility to the self? This is not a large issue for politicians or physicians or poets or businessmen in Fidelity, but appears in the personal activities of the individual, in the daily choices of every person in almost every aspect of their lives, and is therefore far more universal. There is no doubt that the sources of American political democracy, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, are echoed here in an examination of the reasons for the submersion of individual will to social obligation. Trying to convince the mother of Ruth's best friend, Edith, to permit Edith to speak with the now friendless Ruth, Deane attempts to understand her motivations:

I don't believe I quite get this idea about society.What is it? A collection of individuals for mutual benefit and self-protection, I gather. Protection against what? Their own warmest selves? The most real things in them? (150)

Mrs. Lawrence's response to Franklin's use of Locke's social contract is not a rigid reliance upon custom, but an extension of Locke's philosophy. Marital fidelity is a part of the social contract, and

If you can't see that society must close in against a woman like that then all I can say.is that you don't see very straight. You jeer about society, but society is nothing more than life as we have arranged it. It is an institution. One living within it must keep the rules of that institution. One who defies it - deceives it - must be shut out from it. .we owe that to the people who are trying to live decently, to be faithful. Life, as we have arranged it, must be based on confidence. (151-2)

The controversy about the limits of democracy was always basic to the American novel but it is in Fidelity that sexual and social freedom for a woman is identified with individual fulfillment, the "pursuit of happiness," and is seen to be paramount over social obligations. When Ruth visits with an old school-mate of hers, one who was beneath her on the social ladder and has gone on to live a difficult life, she is filled with the revelation of alternative patterns of living. These ideas are not delineated in the manner that the social contract of the town that has excluded her are determined, but are vague, undefined, expressed more as feelings of freedom than "the things of which Annie talked, things men of this new day were expressing, roused her like this, not because they were all new, but because of her own inner gropings." (230) These are gropings 'precisely' because life outside of the rules is as yet undiscovered territory, a new world.

Ultimately the greatest shock in the novel is Ruth's decision to leave her lover of 11 years, now that he is divorced, and to discover a new life in an entirely different area. There is no doubt that the reader will not be prepared for this, Ruth having exhibited no particular interests or talents that would make her suitable for creating a new and exciting life for herself, and for succeeding in this life. But that too is precisely the point. Were Ruth a gifted writer who had been suppressing her talents all these years in order to succeed in her rebellious relationship, it would be understandable, and perfectly in tune with the contemporary novel. We would even have been content had Ruth turned to the now single and deeply devoted Deane Franklin. But Ruth finds her obligation to her self, and self development, in a single devotion to the Emersonian concept of self-fulfillment. Despite her awareness of the extent to which she has contributed to the unhappiness of so many people and her acceptance of her responsibility for this sadness, she has another obligation. She knows that her own loyalty to the feeble and fettered Stuart Williams has contributed to her own unhappiness and her lack of fulfillment. The ultimate fidelity in this: fidelity to the self. Only when the self is fulfilled, is there a possibility for a 'true' society. This is result of Glaspell's inquiry into the concept of fidelity - from faithfulness in marriage, to loyalty in society, to understanding and nurturing the humanity of the individual, whatever the cost or the result.