In Trifles, the country house where the plot takes place is also the scene of a murder. Mrs. Wright kills her husband over a "trifle," because he has killed her canary. The bird, as the house itself, symbolizes entrapment and prison-like life. The lonely country woman feels trapped in her role as a country farm wife, whose only concern must be the trifles of daily life, such as the preserves, and all her other chores. The signs of "incomplete work" that are seen on the scene, show that Mrs. Wright felt imprisoned by her daily joyless life: "Mrs. Hale: (looking about.) it never seemed a very cheerful place. County Attorney. No -- it's not cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the homemaking instinct."(Glaspell, 40)

After killing her husband however, she will only go to another kind of prison, to an actual jail. Probably this is why she wants her apron there, to make her feel more "natural": "She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, for there isn't much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows....

But I suppose just to make her feel more natural."(Glaspell, 41) to Mrs. Wright thus, the jail she will have to spend the rest of her life is nor different from her lifetime imprisonment in the role of a woman and a wife who has no other joy in her life but her concern with the trifles. In Glaspell's work thus, the setting is symbolic of the woman's imprisonment in her own life, and her desire to escape it.
Thus, both stories symbolize imprisonment or isolation through their settings; in Poe's story the imprisonment is willed at first, but the people gathered in the rich palace soon realize there are prisoners of death and mortality. In Trifles, Mrs. Wright feels trapped in her life just as the little canary in its cage, and tries to escape that, but actually goes to another prison, a real jail.

Works Cited

Glaspell, Susan. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Masque of Red Death. New York: Booksurge Classics, 2004.