The Visioning

by Susan Glaspell

Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones was bunkered. Having been bunkered many times in the past, and knowing that she would be bunkered upon many occasions in the future, Miss Jones was not disposed to take a tragic view of the situation.

Genres: Fiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1911

About the author

Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.
Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.
As part of the Provincetown Players, she arranged for the first ever reading of a play by Eugene O'Neill.

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel that questions (set in a time admitted - with larger class differences than today - but it's still relevant!) , why we accept (by hiding behind prejudices and ideas that "they" are different from "me"/ "us") that large groups in our societies, live in poverty, with very few prospects, no room for dreams and constant fear (of bad neighbourhoods, of finding next months rent, how to pay medical bills etc).

The story is a bit sentimental (particularly in the love interests and Katies (in my eyes ridiculous) reluctance to accept criticism of the army She's just as prejudiced as Major Darrett when she freaks and throws out the love of her life because he once struck an officer) - but very insightful! It certainly got me thinking - and discussing, the nature of empathy and privilege - who we give it to, and why.


When it "comes up against our own lives" and we feel OUR privileges threatened, even the slightest - we often de-humanize fellow human beings (poor people, immigrants) in our own minds and hearts.

By accepting a ridiculously low minimum wage, and an extremely unequal division of wealth, we get societies with more crime, more desolation and less happiness all around - this is still true - although the upperclasses of gentlemen and women not working are exchanged for billionaires with private jets, and executives with health benefits...
Lots of "them"'s and "us"'s to go around and create hate, fear and prejudice.
"Did knowing—seeing—spoil hating? And was all hating to go when all men saw?"

An upper class army captain, who falls in love with a working class girl, desperately fighting to stay employed - and living on the dollar a day shop- and factory girls earn, discovers that:

"He had found out something about the conditions girls had to meet. His face hardened, then tightened with pain in the thought of those being the conditions Ann was meeting. He did not believe those conditions would go on many days longer if every man had to see them in relation to some one he cared for. "The poor ye have always with you" might then prove less authoritative—less satisfying—as the final word."

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Visioning was Susan Glaspell’s second novel, first published in 1911 it appears that it is now mainly available as an ebook, although I believe there are print on demand services that carry it too. It is a novel about the images we create of others and the dreams we allow to carry us along. It is also about identity and the class divisions in early twentieth century American society.

read my full review: http://heavenali.wordpress.com/2014/1...

[Mbuye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 1911 novel holds many views we take for granted as self-evident but which were radical for its time, especially coming from a woman. More than a century after it was written, ‘The Visioning' seems only to be a tired potboiler. It is easy to forget that this was not only one of the first, but probably the first novel in America by a woman questioning the right of inventors to create weapons of mass destruction ("Father," he was saying, imagination under the stimulus of things he had been seeing, "I suppose our gun will kill 'bout forty thousand million folks—won't it, father?”) or a kind of veiled approval for a man who was willing to go to prison rather than forfeit his right to act according to his lights. And yet, in retrospect, Glaspell’s views today do not seem radical at all, but simply more in tune with her times than the rest of her generation.

‘The Visioning’ is a Bildungsroman: an absurd idea, given that our main protagonist Katherine Waynworth Jones is over twenty-five. But it is not her blooming from childhood to adulthood we are looking at. Rather, it is the shedding of complacency, of self-indulgence and a world of privilege, of dances and dinner parties, spent with smart young courtiers whose life in the army is also one of privilege, caste and snobbery. In her voyage of self-discovery, Katie Jones wakens to a much darker reality, one in which survival is more important than self-respect, or in which tradition and the polite conventions of society mean little in the face of the freedom to dream of a different reality. She meets more and more people her world despises, people who have escaped the world she admires so much, yet amazingly, have found the contentment and even happiness she has been seeking, but which her pampered life can never give her.

The search for reality, or rather for unconventionality over the hidebound principles of her uncle the Bishop, the quest for the freedom to determine one's actions and choices, the fight for the rights of women, honouring values like tradition, honour, valour for the sake of their antiquity, while despising those of equality, justice, and manual labour simply because they are new, these are what form the themes of this book.

Written in a deliberately fluffy, frilly girlish style to disguise the underlying currents of despair, degradation and ruin, as well as the horrifying levels of spite that Katie can dream up is to see Glaspell at her best. Feminism, modernism, divorce (in 1911!) social and human rights, child up-bringing, army caste and morality – all so iconoclastic! – are what Katie finds through mistakes, misunderstanding, a hitherto unplumbed level of meanness in herself, all of which lead her to an equal relationship with the man she has come to love – a man, naturally, quite out of the pale!

[Brett Stevens · Rating 1 out of 5]

In an attempt to criticize the modern morality, this book falls into modern morality of the neurotic introspective type that denies obvious reality in favor of sentiment. At the root of this is not just the ego, since it seeks to make itself feel good by rationalization, but a sneaky desire to feel smarter than all the people around you. That is unfortunate since there are some fine observations about humanity and its structures in here, including one that is central to my thinking, which is that jobs are miserable and make people into automatons motivated by resentment. However, most solutions are worse, and the obvious solution -- stop doing what has gotten us here -- seems to occur to No One. In the style of many ideological books, this novel feels like a tour of several dozen scenes with inner commentary that must discuss and frame instead of demonstrating what is being experienced, which makes it the dangerous form of seductive but inwardly unconvincing Utopian rant than is popular with those who think little beyond their own emotions and how to manipulate others with them. Stay away from this sociopath.

[Stephanie Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for work on the Kindle. You wouldn't necessarily guess that Glaspell became a great playwright and a great novelist based on this book. The characterisation is not that deep, the structure is not that interesting. You can see her social interests in utero, though. She wants to broaden the horizons of middle-class respectable women, and she senses that doing this through reform projects is inadequate both for the working-class women whose lives are manipulated by others and for the middle-class reformers. There is some interest in the representations of military life, and the contrast between working for the military in the West and working for the forest service, which comes in at the end as a kind of saviour.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half was very good and then the second half - well I was pretty shocked by the behavior of one of the main characters. It just didn’t seem to jibe with her previous personality . It felt like the author had Katie suddenly act that way to prove a point in the story and I understand that. But it lowered my opinion of the book.