Women on the Edge in Susan Glaspell's The Outside and Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour

Abstract

After providing a theoretical background for the Other in the oncoming chapter, I shall put it into practice by analyzing the Other in two plays obviously written by female playwrights in the first half of the twentieth century and about female characters. I shall discuss the meanings of the Other in Susan Glaspell’s (1876-1948) The Outside (1917) and Lillian Hellman’s (1905-1984) The Children’s Hour (1934). As the title of the earlier drama already suggests I shall try to unsettle the definition of the Other and furthermore Otherness in terms of marginalization, in terms of being on the outside, on the edge of society, being the “abject sexual Other” (Adler 118), in terms of the New Woman type of character, in terms of language used by Glaspell and Hellman. The analogy between the two “on the edge” stories is the point where the plays symbolically encounter each other.