Play Trifles by Susan Glaspell

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 of women in 1916.

Glaspell's title indicates to us that we are to be dealing with little things, but her play's message concerns the importance of seeing these little things in a big way. 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 the hard work required to boil and preserve fruit is unlikely to be considered a "trifle" by anyone who has had to do it, as these men presumably have not. The play then asks us to see the "trifles" of circumstantial evidence, which tells a story that the women in the play are able to interpret, while the men fail to notice it at all.

It is the ability to interpret meaning even from absence that launches the central symbol of Glaspell's play: after the two women are left alone in the kitchen, Mrs. Peters discovers a birdcage without a bird in it. Glaspell then offers a careful piece of dialogue:

Mrs Peters (looking around): Seems funny to think of a bird here. But she must have had one, or why did she have the cage? I wonder what happened to it? (19).