Play Susan Glaspell\'s Play Trifles Is Filled

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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 suicide, the act would have raised questions about the ethics of suicide. If indeed Minnie has killed John, several other ethical questions come to the fore. Glaspell opts to leave the ethics of the play purposefully ambiguous. Whereas the men on the side of the law like the Sheriff and Attorney have simplistic ethical systems in which there are clear-cut delineations between right and wrong, the women in Trifles explore far more complex dimensions of moral choices.

Trifles therefore explores two major concepts in ethics: ethical relativism and ethical ambiguity. Ethical relativism suggests that there are situational variables, including the context of culture, that determine whether an act is ethical or not. Gender can be one of those variables. If there is "a range of practices considered morally acceptable in some societies but condemned in others, including infanticide, genocide, polygamy, racism, sexism, and torture," then it becomes clear that if Minnie did indeed kill her husband, the act might not be as categorically wrong as the Attorney and Sheriff believe (Velasquez & Meyer 1). The women certainly seem to be sympathetic to Minnie, especially as they start to suspect Minnie might have been abused. They point out that when she was young, Minnie was beautiful. "She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir," states Mrs. Hale. After being married to John for so many years, the light went from her spirit. Especially when she beholds what her husband was capable of, potentially killing a sweet birdie, it is easy to see how Minnie might snap.

Yet Glaspell deliberately keeps the truth of the death from the reader. There are too many questions about John's death to instantly believe Minnie might be culpable. After all, it would not be possible for an elder woman to physically overtake a man, enough to be able to strangle him. This issue is never raised, showing that the Attorney and Sheriff lack the moral scrutiny befitting men in their posts. The women, on the other hand, do have firm ethical judgments to make. They explore the ethics of neighborly behavior, for example, Mrs. Hale laments, "I could've come. I stayed away because it weren't cheerful -- and that's why I ought to have come." Her phrase, "I ought to have come" shows that she does believe it was her ethical duty to pay attention to her neighbors and care for them.