On or about December, 1910 human ch...

On or about December, 1910 human character changed.

-V Woolf

Within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of her essay, "Mr. Bennett and Mr Brown" Virginia Woolf s frequently quoted observation refers to a change in interpersonal relations, however for us it also summon forths the new theories of human nature, as well as of the cosmo that distaffed the culture and radically altered the way the public saw themselves, each other, and their world as the nineteenth centenary turned into the twentieth. Historian Stephen Kern describes the proces as a change in human consciousness: "From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changes in technology and refinement created distinctive new modes in thinking about and experiencing time and space" (1) Kern goe forward to list the inventions (telephone cinema, automobile, etc) that re-formed spatial and temporal orientations and then discusses the ways in which cultural production mirrored these new ways of seeing the world: "Independent cultural increases such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The eventuate was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought" (1-2)

For playwrights Susan Glaspell and George Cram prepare for the table everyday life offered many examples of ideas transforming clan and culture; such new ideas prov intellectually challenging and creatively stimulating for the leash 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 make loose up the old forms and traditions, to dynamite the baked and hardened earth in such a manner that fresh flowers can grow" (Quot in Heller 217)

Two plays in particular, destroyed Desires (1914) and Tickless Time (1918) engage this strange thinking and function chronologically as bookend for the corpus of Glaspell and Cook's one-act Provincetown Plays.' The civilization of their place and time was the agriculture of modernism, governed by what Brazilian scholar Silviano Santiago has terminused "the aesthetic of the new" and "the aesthetic of rupture" Many of Glaspell's Provincetown plays are informed at these aesthetics, most notably the brace that she wrote with dress up This essay will examine Tickless Time as a work that muses and comments on its intertext, smothered Desires. Read against each other, these plays can complicate and make more grave our understanding of Glaspell and Cook's critique of the modernist impulse to eschew convention and conformity, injure established aesthetic norms, and attain personal expansion and authenticity by embracing strange scientific and psychological theories.

Although they deal with completely different controls Suppressed Desires and Tickless Time have frequently in common. Each play enacts a search for verity a quest for self-actualization, and an attempt to escape from conformity, all characteristics of the early twentieth-century Zeitgeist. Each play deliberates and gently mocks the trendy modernist thinking of Glaspell and Cook's Greenwich Village and Provincetown colleagues. stifleed Desires is ostensibly about psychoanalysis, a make liable that had been a continual theme of conversation and a popular delineate of self-discovery ever since Sigmund Freud lectur at Clark University in 1909 and Dr A.A. Brill subsequently gave a series of talks forward the topic at Mabel Dodge's fashionable Wednesday evening salons. At that time in Greenwich Village, it became chic to go through psychoanalysis: Mabel Dodge herself and Masses editors Floyd dale 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 dale lecturing on the subject at a party and then psychoanalyzing the guests: "And now he had begun psyching us. Not Floyd alone still others in the group did it. They psyched me They psyched men passing in the street" (243)

Tickless Time, written thirty-four years after the establishment of World Standard Time according to the Prime Meridian Conference, thirteen years after Einstein's discovery 01 special relativity, and pair years after his discovery of general relativity, cogitates scientific and lay concerns with the nature of time and space that were generated by the agency of Einstein's work and that of other early twentieth-century scientists and thinkers. While the idea for the play may have originated in Jig Cook's cast of constructing a plaster sundial for their Provincetown household that Glaspell describes in The Road to the fane (280-81), the drama itself uses this incident as a jumpingoff point to place in dialogue conflicting notions of time, space, canon and representation. Eloise Joyce's question to her husband, "Ian, which do you think is the more wonderful-space or time?' (Plays 279) brings to mind Einstein's then passing from hand to hand notion of spacetime, a single backdrop against which all results are staged, in contradiction to the Newtonian ideas of separate and independent Absolute Space and Time. Ian Joyce's enthusiastic assertion that "space is rhyme and time is flow...." (Plays 281) also call ups Einstein's revolutionary conception, as well as Henri Bergson's notion of time as dysentery (dur?©e).2