Suppressed Desires and Tickless Time: An Intertextual Critique of Modernity

On or about December, 1910, human character changed. --V. Woolf Within the context of her essay, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Virginia Woolf's frequently quoted observation refers to a change in interpersonal relations, but for us it also evokes the new theories of human nature, as well as of the cosmos, that rocked the culture and radically altered the way people saw themselves, each other, and their world as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Historian Stephen Kern describes the process as a change in human consciousness: "From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes in thinking about and experiencing time and space" (1). Kern goes on to list the inventions (telephone, cinema, automobile, etc.) that re-formed spatial and temporal orientations and then discusses the ways in which cultural production reflected these new ways of seeing the world: "Independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought" (1-2). For playwrights Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, everyday life offered many examples of ideas transforming people and culture; such new ideas proved intellectually challenging and creatively stimulating for the couple as well. Fellow Provincetown Player Hutchins Hapgood described the spirit that motivated his contemporaries in this way: "Whether in literature, plastic art, the labor movement ... we find an instinct to loosen up the old forms and traditions, to dynamite the baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers can grow" (Quoted in Heller 217). Two plays in particular, Suppressed Desires (1914) and Tickless Time (1918), engage this new thinking and function chronologically as bookends for the corpus of Glaspell and Cook's one-act Provincetown Plays. (1) The culture of their place and time was the culture of modernism, governed by what Brazilian scholar Silviano Santiago has termed "the aesthetic of the new" and "the aesthetic of rupture." Many of Glaspell's Provincetown plays are informed by these aesthetics, most notably the two that she wrote with Cook. This essay will examine Tickless Time as a work that reflects and comments on its intertext, Suppressed Desires. Read against each other, these plays can complicate and deepen our understanding of Glaspell and Cook's critique of the modernist impulse to eschew convention and conformity, subvert established aesthetic norms, and attain personal growth and authenticity by embracing new scientific and psychological theories. Although they deal with completely different subjects, Suppressed Desires and Tickless Time have much in common. Each play enacts a search for truth, a quest for self-actualization, and an attempt to escape from conformity, all characteristics of the early twentieth-century zeitgeist. Each play reflects and gently mocks the trendy modernist thinking of Glaspell and Cook's Greenwich Village and Provincetown colleagues. Suppressed Desires is ostensibly about psychoanalysis, a subject that had been a continual theme of conversation and a popular project of self-discovery ever since Sigmund Freud lectured at Clark University in 1909 and Dr. A.A. Brill subsequently gave a series of talks on the topic at Mabel Dodge's fashionable Wednesday evening salons. At that time in Greenwich Village, it became chic to undergo psychoanalysis: Mabel Dodge herself and Masses editors Floyd Dell and Max Eastman were among the first to be psychoanalyzed. Sherwood Anderson recalls in his memoirs that "Freud had been discovered at the time and all the young intellectuals were busy analyzing each other and everyone they met" (243). Anderson remembers Dell lecturing on the subject at a party and then psychoanalyzing the guests: "And now he had begun psyching us. …