Minnie Wright: A Mystery Character in Glaspell's "Trifles"

Introduction: The Mystery of an Absent Character

In Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles and the related short story "A Jury of Her Peers," the character of Minnie Wright is continuously scrutinized yet never appears. Instead, we learn about Minnie through the many "trifles" — small clues recognized by the two women who accompany the official murder investigation team. The narrative plays out like a mystery, with Minnie's identity and motive as its central object. Both the play and the story follow the same pattern, though each proceeds with slightly different emphasis. Both texts reach the same end: through the many small pieces of the feminine sphere — recognizable to other women as signs of Minnie's mental state — the character of Minnie Wright becomes clear by the conclusion. The mystery put forth in Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers" is, in essence, a mystery story, with the missing character of Minnie Wright pieced together through seemingly insignificant details.

The story of Minnie Wright plays out like a murder mystery in both texts. Clausson points to the strong similarities between Glaspell's two works and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle; most notably, the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes himself refers to his skills as "the observation of trifles" (81). After all, the essence of Minnie Wright's story is the search for a reason: if she is guilty, why did she murder her husband? In this very basic way, Minnie Wright is the central character in a murder mystery, and to solve it, the reader must reconstruct her.

The complication in this task is that Minnie Wright does not appear in either Glaspell's play or her story (Noe 36–54). Instead, she is only spoken of and imagined by the other characters. Noe explains that this device works well for Glaspell as a writer because the "unseen woman" draws attention to the marginalization of women who are overlooked by men in a patriarchal society. Additionally, it overcomes the difficulty of portraying a primary female character without objectifying her (Noe 36–54). Feminist considerations aside, Glaspell's stylistic choice also creates suspense and intrigue, since we never see or hear Minnie Wright explain herself.

The Feminine Sphere as Evidence

Rather than hearing from Minnie directly, we must rely on the actions and thoughts of the "seen" characters to recreate her. Most notably, the two women who accompany the formal investigating team are able to piece together who Minnie Wright is through their inspection of things they find familiar: the "trifles" of the feminine sphere of the rural Midwestern woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hedges 89).

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale allow us to see Minnie without actually seeing her. Both women share a significant number of life experiences and similar responsibilities with Minnie. As such, they can perceive many small things that are nevertheless significant. These insignificant "trifles" include the half-sifted flour, the preserved fruit, the poorly sewn quilting patch, and the dead canary.

Bread, Preserves, and the Weight of Isolation

One of the trifles noticed by the women but overlooked by the men is the flour and bread. Mustazza points out that this scene contains one of the subtle differences between Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers" (489). In Trifles, Mrs. Peters simply mentions that Minnie Wright has set out the bread. In "A Jury of Her Peers," however, Glaspell expands on what Mrs. Hale is thinking in a way that helps the reader make the connection (Mustazza 489). This expansion is not an option in the play, where inserting internal monologue is difficult. When Glaspell adapted her one-act play into story form, she took the opportunity to fill in sections that could benefit from the detail Mrs. Hale's thoughts provide. Rather than offering a vague comment, the character in the story can offer insight through her unspoken thoughts.

In this section of the story, Mrs. Hale notices that Minnie Foster left her baking quite abruptly — half finished with sifting the flour. She wonders what could have made her stop so suddenly, something she hides from Mrs. Peters to spare her the unsettled feeling of work left undone (Mustazza 489). Without this explanation, the one-act play offers only the sparse statement that Minnie set out the bread — a detail so subtle it may easily be passed over.

The preserved fruit is another detail through which the reader can learn about Minnie Wright's state of mind, as well as the condition of other homesteading women in the Midwest during this period. The isolation Minnie lived in made her hyper-conscious of her work. She carried a great amount of responsibility and had little to no social connection, since Mr. Wright did not allow her to be involved in the local community and did not even own a telephone (Glaspell). In this intense isolation, Minnie is acutely aware that her preserved fruit is at risk from the cold that would fill the house in her absence. To the police, this is — like the other items the women notice — a trifle. However, Minnie's relayed concern that her preserves have been ruined is instantly understood by the other two women; both the play and the story include the women expressing "what a shame" it is that all of Minnie's hard work was for nothing (Mustazza 489).

So difficult for the men to understand is Minnie's concern over her preserves that one of them comments that women are too concerned with "trifles," giving the play its name (Hedges 89). The significance of this word as the title is that the small things are not trifles. Here, though her husband is dead and she is in prison, Minnie Wright is concerned for her preserves — and for good reason. In an attempt to solve the mystery of Minnie Wright, it is necessary to understand why. The reader can learn the answer by observing the other women. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters show us that the total isolation in which Minnie Wright was living gave her nothing else to be concerned with (Hedges 89).

Conclusion: Trifles as the Key to Minnie Wright

Like any murder mystery, the very small clues add up to allow an overall picture to emerge. Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of following any mystery, Glaspell's story "A Jury of Her Peers" is longer and more detailed than the original play Trifles (Mustazza 489). As might be expected, the added detail and wording appear almost exclusively in the identification and recognition of the tiny clues noticed by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. These trifles also fall almost completely within the feminine and domestic sphere, making them more visible to women who inhabit the same "world" as the accused Mrs. Wright.

The two women who are present in Minnie's house and share her sphere humanize the unseen character by sharing her experiences. They create a human and tangible woman through the many trifles they observe (Hedges 89). Glaspell's use of the word trifles in both the text and the title of her one-act play should draw the reader's attention to the importance of the many small clues embedded throughout. Like any reader of a mystery story, such references signal what matters. In the case of Minnie Wright's identity and motives, the "trifles" come together to illuminate the answers to a complex mystery.

In the same way that women like Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Minnie Wright were overlooked and marginalized in their time and place, the answers to the investigators' questions of motive were also overlooked. The men failed to perceive the many small items that added up to the larger picture. Because they dismissed the importance of "trifles," the investigators could not solve the mystery of who Minnie Wright was or why she would murder her husband.

Works Cited

Clausson, Nils. "The Case of the Purloined Genre: Breaking the Codes in Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury of Her Peers.'" Genre 34.1–2 (2001): 81–100.

Glaspell, Susan. A Jury of Her Peers. Annenberg Media, Cambridge, MT. 30 April 2007.

Glaspell, Susan. "Trifles." Plays. BiblioBazaar, 2006. 30 Apr. 2007.

Hedges, Elaine. "Small Things Reconsidered: Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury of Her Peers.'" Women's Studies 12 (1986): 89–110.

Holstein, Suzy Clarkson. "Silent Justice in a Different Key: Glaspell's 'Trifles.'" The Midwest Quarterly 44.3 (2003): 282–292.

Mustazza, Leonard. "Generic Translation and Thematic Shift in Susan Glaspell's 'Trifles' and 'A Jury of Her Peers.'" Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (1989): 489–96.

Noe, Marsha. "Reconfiguring the Subject/Recuperating Realism: Susan Glaspell's Unseen Woman." American Drama 4.2 (1995): 36–54.

Russell, Judith Kay. "Glaspell's 'Trifles.'" The Explicator 55.2 (1997): 88–90.