Worthy of Being on Stage

Worthy of Being on Stage

Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Tennessee Williams' the Glass Menagerie are, in spite of the different styles they use, very similar in their subjects and especially in the way they the construct the main relationships between men and women. The female protagonists in the stories, Laura in the Glass Menagerie and Mrs. Wright in Trifles, are also alike in many ways. Both plays represent femininity through symbols of extreme sensibility and fragility, such as the dead bird in Trifles and the glass animal collection in Tennessee Williams' play. The utter sensibility of both Laura and Mrs. Wright is indicated by the titles of the plays: the "trifles" they are so fond of symbolize their fragile and deep inner worlds. As opposed to these, the men appear as the external powers that smash these trifles: in the Glass Menagerie Jim unintentionally breaks Laura's tiny glass unicorn and in Trifles John Wright kills his wife's singing bird. Thus, these two relationships oppose the masculine and the feminine worlds, emphasizing the feminine sensibility which is seen by men as frivolous and exaggerated. The plays' style and subject are worthy to be set on scene as are a token for this utmost fragility of the feminine psyche, which often goes unnoticed. The daily rough reality (represented in the plays by the men's world of action) makes female sensibility seem a negligible trifle, and the two texts are enlightening as they succeed in capturing it through the characters, the style and the symbols employed.

Glaspell's play is thus an overt criticism of the disregard that men have for the female, seemingly unimportant world. The main relationship in the story, that between the two absent characters, Mrs. Wright and her husband, is very significant: Mr. Wright gets strangled with a rope in his sleep and the main suspect is of course, his wife. The investigations and inquiries made by the sheriff and the attorney are symbols of the typical, pragmatic and masculine world of action. In the meanwhile the wives, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters notices the "trifles" connected with the main female occupations: the preserves, the needle work and so on. While the men are incapable of finding the most important detail of the crime, the motive, the two women discover it through their sensibility as women, and through the understanding that comes from common experience. The "evidence" appears thus in the shape of the dead bird that, as they deduce, was killed by her husband because of its singing. Significantly, the couple did not have any apparent problems, and John was usually seen as a "good man." The question comes back to the sensibility that he never had, and which was killing his wife slowly: "Yes -- good; he didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him. (Shivers.) Like a raw wind that gets to the bone. (Pauses, her eye falling on the cage.) I should think she would 'a wanted a bird. But what do you suppose went with it?"(Glaspell)

The play thus emphasizes the neglected "trifles" of the inner life which seem unimportant, as they produce no obvious effect on the outer reality. The sheriff and the attorney laugh at the "little things" that the wives engage their attention with, but in this way they miss the most important evidence of the crime: the motive, therefore its real meaning: "I don't know as there's anything so strange, our takin' up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence."(Glaspell) the killing of the bird seems a trifle that is unlikely to obtain such a violent reaction as murder, but it does have an significant symbolic quality: Mrs. Wright reasserts the importance of the interior life, of the female sensibility.

Apart from this symbolic level, the play is worthy for representation because the main relationship is also reflected in the other peripheral relationships, thus achieving a full view of the pattern of the intercourse between men and women. Also, it is a powerful feminist text that draws the attention on the destructive effect that the strict and coercive roles the women have to play, has on their inner lives. As mothers, wives and housekeepers women can hardly enact their sensibility: "Not having children makes less work -- but it makes a quiet house, and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did come in."(Glaspell)

Men do nothing but laugh at the trivialities that women are preoccupied with, preserving their belief that the sensibility is something exaggerated and that women always make a fuss over the most banal things:

My, it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us. Wouldn't they just laugh! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a -- dead canary. As if that could have anything to do with--with -- wouldn't they laugh!"(Glaspell)

Glaspell's play therefore is truly enlightening in many respects, and is worthy of being represented on stage as it manages to pinpoint the way in which the interior world and the sensibility of the women is for the most part ignored or considered as trivial. The message is perfectly encapsulated in the murder plot, and the police investigation contrasts with the women's investigation of the inner life.

The glass collection of animals that is the sole pleasure of the extremely shy Laura is another symbol of absolute fragility. The little unicorn that Jim unwittingly breaks is clearly a representation of the ideal, lost world. The fabulous animal that is not part of the modern world translates the imaginary and deep sensibility of Laura, who is incapable of adapting to the social context. She is moreover crippled, a fact which increases her shyness and introverted nature. Significantly, the only boy she ever liked, Jim, is brought over to dinner one day at her mother's insistence, in the posture of a "gentleman caller." They have a brief moment together in which Jim tells her she is a special and kisses her, but then she smashes her unicorn unintentionally and leaves to see his girlfriend, Betty. The plot is significant as it emphasizes, like Glaspell's play the masculine world of action, represented by Jim's extroverted nature, his high school successes (he is called the high school hero) his public speaking career, as opposed to the feminine, delicate inner world represented by the "glass menagerie." The plot and the symbols outline the way in which the inner world is overlooked by the daily reality.