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Susan Glaspell's Trifles
The title of Susan Glaspell's drama Trifles indicates that it will deal with seemingly small matters: as Mrs. Hale says of the pivotal prop in the stage-play -- "Wouldn't they just laugh? Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a -- dead canary!" (Glaspell 27-8). Yet Mrs. Hale's sense that, if a male audience could see her dialogue with Mrs. Peters in Trifles by Susan Glaspell, they would fail to understand Glaspell's use of the songbird as a symbol of the plight of disenfranchised woman. Glaspell wrote Trifles in 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave American women the right to vote. I wish to show that, although Glaspell's play long predates the feminist slogan "the personal is the political," she nonetheless uses symbolism that works on both a personal and political level, to make a statement about the condition...
The setting of the play is the scene of a crime: Hale had discovered a murder in this "now abandoned farmhouse" whose "signs of incompleted work" testify to the heavy burden of labor demanded of the nineteenth century housewife (3). It is the women who recognize these things as hard work: Mrs. Hale will note with condolence that "her fruit: it did freeze" when the burst jam jars are discovered in the cabinet (9). The Sheriff responds with paternalistic dismissiveness: "Well, can you beat the women? Held for murder and worrying about her preserves" (9). Hale's response chimes with the play's title: "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles" (9). Yet…
In reality, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are even more invested in the investigation than the men, because they demonstrate an attention to detail that the men lack. By the time the men return from their fruitless investigations, the women have determined both why and how Mrs. Wright murdered her husband, and they even come to the decision not to supply the evidence without ever alerting the men. Furthermore,
While men ignore the kitchen as containing "nothing but kitchen things," women look for evidence precisely there because it is the only place where women are in control. As Holstein (2003) argues, women do not enter the house of Mr. Wright as a place of investigation but as a home of two human beings who have feelings. For men, what matters is the evidence and if they find one,
Trifles Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles is frequently anthologized, and for good reason (Makowsky 59; Cerf 103). The play differs from a traditional drama in a number of ways, including its structure and narrative content, but arguably its most important feature is it reveals who its protagonists are and the effect this character choice has on the play as a whole. Although the actions of Minnie Wright constitute the narrative focus
TRIFLES by Susan Glaspell In "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell, the characteristics of the women and the attitudes to their men and their own roles in life are gradually illuminated. The intensity of the situation, in effect two women judging the life of the third, absent party, provides a context in which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter grow significantly, in character, strength and importance. The principle characters in the play are effectively the
How -- she -- did -- change."(Glaspell) the second sense of the play's title becomes obvious: there is no place in the male world of overt action for women's fragility and sensibility, symbolized by the singing bird. The two wives intuitively understand that Mrs. Wright's husband could not understand or like "a thing that sang": "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird -- a thing that sang. She used to
Play Susan Glaspell's play Trifles is filled with moral questions and ethical ambiguity. Throughout the one-act play, each character makes moral and ethical choices that affect the outcome of the investigation. Their moral choices also reveal key things about their characters, their worldview, and their ethical codes. At the center of the play is Minnie Wright and her dead husband John. Death is often a moral matter. If John had committed