Motivation for Murder in Susan Glaspell\'s Play

Motivation for Murder in Susan Glaspell's Play Trifles

In her brief play Trifles (1916) author Susan Glaspell seems at first to use the aftermath of a woman's having murdered her husband as her main action. However, by the conclusion of this play, it becomes clear that this event, and the way the other characters react to it, is of mere secondary importance. Glaspell uses the setting of the investigation of the murder of Mr. John Wright, by his emotionally abused wife while he slept, to demonstrate deeper underlying concerns. The most important of these is the trivialization, especially by male characters within the play (e.g., Hale; the Sheriff; the County Attorney, and by implication, John Wright) of the women's lives, feelings, perceptions, and rights. In this essay, I will explore ways that Glaspell uses character, language, and setting to develop her theme of women's desperate aloneness in circumstances like Mrs. Wright's, and how Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, similarly subjugated by men, understand Mrs. Wright's rationale for murder, although the male characters do not.

As the play opens, Mr. Wright has been murdered yesterday (as we learn, hanged by the neck with a rope while sleeping in his bed). His wife, Mrs. Wright, is believed to have killed him. Today, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peterson, along with the Sheriff; the County Attorney, and Mr. Hale, have come back to the house to discuss the crime, and for Mr. Hale in particular to explain what he had seen and heard when he came upon the crime scene by accident, having stopped over to see John Wright that day. One initial clue we receive about the emotional abuse Mrs. Wright endures from her husband is when Hale muses, to the Sheriff and others assembled inside the Wright house, that "I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John" (Glaspell). Clearly, if outsiders can easily see how inconsiderate John generally is of his wife's desires and feelings, this is a good indication of the Wrights' emotionally bereft marriage. Before the group goes upstairs from the kitchen, so that Hale can there recall for the rest how he found John Wright dead, Mrs. Peters, one of the women present who knows Mrs. Wright, says of her: "Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire'd go out and her jars would break."

The Sheriff then says, "Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves." Here, the Sheriff does not (and the other two men do not, either) grasp what Mrs. Peters is really saying. She is speaking not so much of Mrs. Wright's fruit preserves as she is, metaphorically, of the chilly atmosphere of her Mrs. Wright's home, not just physically, but otherwise as well. Like the Sheriff, moreover, the County Attorney fails to grasp the deeper, implied meaning of Mrs. Peters' words about Mrs. Wright, when he says, "I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about." Then Hale adds, "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles."

The two women then "move a little closer," presenting, at least through their body language, a united front against the men's verbal assault, not only of Mrs. Wright, but by implication of them as well. The women, however, understand Mrs. Wright, her moods and preoccupations, and likely, her motivation for murder. The men, on the other hand, notice nothing further about Mrs. Wright except for her less than perfect housekeeping. When Mrs. Hale, says, in Mrs. Wright's defense, after the County Attorney has criticized Mrs. Wright's housekeeping, "There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm." The County Attorney then retorts: "Ah, loyal to your sex . . . "

Based, then, on the County Attorney's increasingly boorish behavior, and the similar behavior of the other men, it becomes easy to understand why the female characters sympathize with Mrs. Wright. Their sympathy for her is due not only to the men's insensitive comments about Mrs. Wright, and women in general, but to their own domestic lives. Mrs. Hale, for instance, is obviously married to the witness-to-be, Mr. Hale, who is no more sensitive than the rest. The dead canary at the end of the play, as the women realize, moreover, is symbolic of Mrs. Wright's own miserable life with the murdered Mr. Wright. Like the dead canary that he has cruelly killed because he did not like its singing, Mrs. Wright's marriage has choked the life out of her, and she, in turn, has done the same to her husband.