The Outside premiered during the second New York Season of the Provincetown Players (1917-1918), and it is Glaspell's fifth play, the third she wrote on her own. The play includes all the stylistic elements that characterize Glaspell's oeuvre: marginal female protagonists, symbolic struggles between opposed forces, and experimentation with language. With this play Glaspell marked a stark disjunction towards a theatrical form that she had not displayed so overtly in her previous works, and which has made critics see in her a forerunner of Beckett's or Camus's absurdist plays (Bigsby 14, Sarlós 256).
As she had done in Trifles, Glaspell favoured again the one-act form, a general agreement among the …
Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are not a subscriber, please click here to read about membership. All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors.