It’s the early 20th century in the small Midwestern city of Freeport. Dr. Deane Franklin is a member of its upper crust, but strong-minded enough to occasionally go against the social grain. Indeed, one character who consults him for medical treatment because he’s “the best doctor in town” can’t help but comment that “you’re a queer one.”
Deane’s oddity, as Susan Glaspell makes clear in her 1915 novel Fidelity, lies in his unwillingness to go along with the crowd, such as the routine snobbishness toward the lower classes and, even more, his continued affection and friendship for Ruth Holland, a woman he grew up with.
Ruth, who left Freeport under a cloud 11 years earlier, has returned to see her dying father. But she continues to get the cold shoulder from her upper-class circle, including her former best friend Edith Lawrence, now Edith Blair. One morning, Deane stops to talk with Edith on her porch and seems to be persuading her to visit Ruth—until her mother comes out of the house.
To talk about Ruth, Mrs. Lawrence says, is “an absurd discussion.” But, Deane insists, it’s not absurd to talk about “the happiness of as fine a human being as Ruth Holland.” Then, in the quietest of voices, Mrs. Lawrence lets loose:
“Ruth Holland is a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it. She was a thief, really—stealing from the thing that was protecting her…She was not only what we call a bad woman, she was a hypocrite.”
"She was not only what we call a bad woman, she was a hypocrite.”
Ruth, the older woman asserts, is a “thief” and a “bad woman” because she violated the rules of society, and anyone who does that “must be shut out from it.” It’s only “self-defense.”
Ruth’s sin: She and Stuart Williams, a married man, fell in love.
Her friends, family and upper-crust circle didn’t find out about the affair until the morning after Ruth left town. She went to join Stuart for life in Arizona where he hoped to overcome his tuberculosis. And, to make matters worse, Ruth and Stuart could never marry because his wife Marion, out of spite, refused to grant a divorce.
No matter where they went, they were shunned by “respectable” people.
Twice Rediscovered
Susan Glaspell, who lived in Chicago at various times in her life, wrote nine novels and fifteen plays, including Alison's House which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1931. Fidelity was her third novel, and, although it garnered some initial praise, it soon faded away, little-read for more than a century.
Today, though, it’s been rediscovered as an early feminist novel—not once but twice.
Two new handsome, well-produced trade paperbacks of the book have been published, almost simultaneously, by Belt Publishing and Southern Illinois University Press, equally attractive and sturdy.
Belt Publishing, an arm of Arcadia Publishing, gets its name from its specialization: books about the Rust Belt. Its edition of Fidelity, which includes a six-page introduction by Pace University English scholar Sarah Blackwood, is part of its Belt Revivals series, resurrecting “unjustly forgotten, newly resonant works from the American Midwest,” now numbering more than a dozen.
The annotated edition from Southern Illinois University Press lists 28 editors, all students at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They wrote the 14-page introduction and the scattering of useful footnotes in a course on editing and the publishing industry, taught by Professor Kevin McMullen. They also got guidance from Marcia Noe, whose 1983 book Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland brought new attention to Fidelity.
As a title, Fidelity operates on multiple levels. Mrs. Lawrence and her crowd are upset Ruth hasn’t shown fidelity to society, that she hasn’t been loyal to the rules and safeguards that gave her (and them) a cushy existence.
Ruth turns her back on that existence and that crowd to follow, to show fidelity to, what she calls simply “life.”
During her return to Freeport—seemingly a stand-in for Davenport, Iowa, where Glaspell grew up and had her own experience bucking society—Ruth revisits the secluded street of her secret meetings with Stuart. She ruminates on being the “woman who had paid so terribly for the girl’s love” but isn’t complaining:
It brought a feeling that she had not paid too much, that no paying was ever too much for love. Love made life; and in turn love was what life was for. To live without it would be going through life without having been touched alive. In that moment it seemed no wrong love could bring about would be as deep as the wrong of denying love.
Novels about how society crushes independent-minded women, particularly those alive to their sexuality, are among the greatest in literature, including Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878). That’s because they aren’t “feminist” in the narrow sense but look at the human condition with great depth and insight. Another great novel, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), tells a similar story but about a man beaten down by society, Newland Archer.
Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina die by suicide, whereas Fidelity concludes with Ruth, bruised and battered by all that she’s gone through, brimming with an even more expansive openness to life and heading to a new adventure.
Times had changed from the 19th century, and, when Glaspell was writing, the reading public was open to a rule-breaker such as Ruth who didn’t have to pay for her sins with tragedy. Yet, Fidelity isn’t a melodrama with a happy ending.
The Novel’s Grit
What gives the novel its grit is Glaspell’s willingness to look at another aspect of the title, an aspect that has to do with collateral damage.
What gives the novel its grit is Glaspell’s willingness to look at another aspect of the title, an aspect that has to do with collateral damage.
Ruth’s decision to fall in love and leave with Stuart as well as her later choices cause pain to a great many people, especially people who love her. In showing fidelity to her need to find “life,” Ruth doesn’t show fidelity to her love for them or to theirs for her.
Ruth’s mother, for instance, dies of something like a broken heart within a year of her flight. Her father loses interest in his bank and in living. And her friend Deane Franklin finds that his friendship with Ruth threatens his new marriage to Amy who begins siding with the Mrs. Lawrences of the town.
Even so, he views the messy situation that Ruth causes as “not as a thing that should or should not be, but as a thing that was; not as a thing that should or should not be, but as life.”
Deane spends the novel searching for “life” in his own way and, at the end, finds what he hopes is a way to a richer existence. Ruth does as well.
On some level, Glaspell’s novel asks: What of the pain such decisions cause? How responsible is Ruth for the disruptions she causes in many lives? How much do those who lead “safe” lives need to be protected from adventurers like Ruth?
Mrs. Lawrence has her own answer about bad women. Ruth is sure of her response. But Glaspell leaves the questions up in the air as the novel comes to an end.
The two editions of Fidelity are available at bookstores and through the Belt Publishing website and the Southern Illinois University website.
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