• Collateral Damage Sexual Abuse in Susan Glaspell's Life and Late Novels
• Veronica Makowsky (bio)

"There was one man was bad to me. He said I was to be his little girl, but he was a bad man. … [I]t makes me different—what happened—doesn't it?"¹ In the early twentieth century, a sexually abused child like Hertha, the enigmatic center of Susan Glaspell's 1940 novel The Morning Is Near Us could only express her experience in broad and unspecific terms and conclude that there was now something that made her "different" in a world that valued chaste conformity in women. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, women of all classes, races, and cultures, as part of the Me, Too Movement, are asserting their right to tell their stories, to accuse and to seek justice against sexual abusers, and to refuse labels that stigmatize female sexuality. As in so many other ways, Glaspell (1876–1948), a Pulitzer-Prize–winning playwright and best-selling novelist, was ahead of her time. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Glaspell's fiction and plays repeatedly return to the vexed and uneven battlefield of sexual intimacy and violence, particularly the ways in which forced sex has destroyed or distorted women's lives. Glaspell's work articulates what many women could not: her writing speaks for women with limited agency and lack of access to justice due to their social class and their status as immigrants or children of immigrants.

Today Glaspell is best known for her one-act play Trifles (1916) in which an abused wife, Minnie Wright, kills her husband. In the play, neighboring farm wives try to imagine her life and motives, thus voicing what Minnie cannot or will not. The title "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), Glaspell's short-story version of Trifles, indicates her belief [End Page 199] that only other women, not the all-male juries that were typical of the era, could judge the mistreated wife.² The issue of domestic abuse as understood by women and misunderstood by men persists in Glaspell's mature novels, especially Brook Evans (1928) and Fugitive's Return (1929).³ Glaspell's exploration of these issues culminates in The Morning Is Near Us, in which domestic abuse intersects with complex and nuanced representations of class and ethnicity.

For the purposes of this article, I am using the term "ethnicity" not as a vague synonym for race but in the sense that it would have been understood in Glaspell's day—and until the recent present—to refer to a social group with a common national or cultural tradition (for example, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, German Americans, and so forth). As a woman born in 1876, Glaspell experienced the great wave of immigrants to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, a highly xenophobic period. The kind of domestic and sexual abuse to which women were subjected was amplified by their ethnicity, as it is for the fictional Hertha in The Morning Is Near Us. As Martha C. Carpentier aptly observes, Glaspell "conflates the immigrant, not only with the orphan, but with the rape victim, associating ethnic deracination with gender depredation."⁴

While Glaspell was certainly responding to the many examples of sexual abuse that were evident in American society at large, I contend in this essay that she was also reacting to the quite specific legal charge of seduction that her father Elmer Glaspell faced in 1881, when Susan was about five years old. "A household servant prosecuted Glaspell's father for sexual assault," Sharon E. Wood notes in her article "Susan Glaspell and the Politics of Sexuality."⁵ Wood briefly mentions this charge in the context of her argument about the extent of sexual exploitation and abuse in and around Glaspell's hometown, Davenport, Iowa, particularly as it relates to Glaspell's depiction of a so-called fallen woman in her second novel, The Visioning (1911). I was particularly intrigued by the accusation of legal seduction and decided to look further into it. In response to my queries, Katie Reinhardt, special collections librarian at the Davenport, Iowa Public Library, found the legal record...

• 苏珊·格拉斯佩尔生平和晚期小说中的附带损害性虐待
• 维罗妮卡·马科夫斯基（生物）

“有一个男人对我不好。他说我要做他的小女孩，但他是个坏男人。……[我]不会让我与众不同——发生了什么——不是吗？” ¹在 20 世纪初，像赫塔这样被性虐待的孩子，苏珊·格拉斯佩尔 1940 年小说《早晨就在我们身边》的神秘中心只能用笼统和不具体的术语来表达她的经历，并得出结论，在一个重视女性贞洁顺从的世界里，现在有一些东西让她“与众不同”。在二十一世纪的前几十年，所有阶级、种族和文化的女性，作为我也是运动的一部分，都在维护她们讲述自己的故事、指控性虐待者和寻求正义的权利，以及拒绝污名化女性性行为的标签。与许多其他方面一样，普利策奖获奖剧作家和畅销小说家格拉斯佩尔（1876-1948）走在了时代的前面。跨越二十世纪上半叶，格拉斯佩尔的小说和戏剧一再回到性亲密和暴力的烦恼和不平衡的战场，尤其是强迫性行为破坏或扭曲女性生活的方式。格拉斯佩尔的作品表达了许多女性无法表达的观点：她的作品为那些由于社会阶层和移民或移民子女的身份而无法获得司法救助的女性代言。

今天，格拉斯佩尔最出名的是她的单幕剧Trifles (1916)，其中一位受虐待的妻子 Minnie Wright 杀死了她的丈夫。在剧中，邻家农妇试图想象她的生活和动机，从而表达出米妮不能或不愿意的声音。Glaspell 的短篇小说版本 Trifles 的标题“A Jury of Her Peers”（1917 年）表明她相信[End Page 199]只有其他女性，而不是那个时代典型的全男性陪审团，才能判断虐待妻子。^{2格拉斯佩尔的成熟小说，尤其是布鲁克·埃文斯 (} Brook Evans ) (1928) 和逃亡者归来(1929) ，一直存在女性理解和男性误解的家庭虐待问题。³格拉斯佩尔对这些问题的探索在《早晨就在我们身边》中达到高潮，其中家庭虐待与对阶级和种族的复杂而微妙的表现相交。

出于本文的目的，我使用“种族”一词不是作为种族的模糊同义词，而是从某种意义上说，在格拉斯佩尔时代（直到最近的现在）它会被理解为指一个具有种族特征的社会群体。共同的民族或文化传统（例如，意大利裔美国人、犹太裔美国人、德裔美国人等）。作为一名出生于 1876 年的女性，格拉斯佩尔在 1880 年至 1920 年间经历了移民美国的大潮，这是一个高度仇外的时期。女性遭受的家庭虐待和性虐待被她们的种族放大了，就像《早晨就在我们身边》中虚构的赫塔一样. 正如 Martha C. Carpentier 恰当地观察到的那样，格拉斯佩尔“将移民混为一谈，不仅与孤儿，而且与强奸受害者，将种族灭绝与性别掠夺联系起来。” ⁴

虽然格拉斯佩尔肯定对美国社会普遍存在的许多性虐待例子做出了回应，但我在这篇文章中认为，她也在对她父亲埃尔默·格拉斯佩尔在 1881 年面临的相当具体的引诱法律指控做出反应，当时苏珊大约五岁。“一名家庭佣人以性侵犯罪起诉了格拉斯佩尔的父亲，”莎朗·E·伍德在她的文章“苏珊·格拉斯佩尔和性政治”中指出。⁵伍德在她关于格拉斯佩尔家乡爱荷华州达文波特及其周边地区性剥削和性虐待程度的论点中简要提到了这一指控，特别是因为它与格拉斯佩尔在她的第二部小说《The远见（1911）。我对合法诱惑的指控特别感兴趣，并决定进一步调查。在回答我的询问时，爱荷华州公共图书馆达文波特的特别馆藏馆员 Katie Reinhardt 找到了法律记录……