42+ paper examples, study guides & outlines
Susan Glaspell was an American playwright and fiction writer active in the early twentieth century whose work sits at the intersection of literary modernism, American drama, and feminist thought. She is studied most frequently in literature, women's studies, and American drama courses, where her writing draws attention because it challenges gender norms and legal authority through carefully constructed domestic settings. Her one-act play Trifles and its prose adaptation A Jury of Her Peers are the works most commonly assigned, and both center on the investigation of a suspected murder involving characters named Hale, Peters, and Wright. The tension between what men dismiss as trivial domestic "trifles" and what women recognize as crucial evidence gives the texts their enduring academic appeal.
Student papers on Glaspell tend to take several distinct approaches. Literary analysis essays examine symbols within Trifles — the broken birdcage, the unfinished quilt, the preserved fruit — as evidence of character psychology and thematic argument. Feminist readings ask in what sense the play can be considered a feminist text, focusing on how female characters subvert male authority. Comparative essays pair Trifles with A Jury of Her Peers to explore how genre shapes meaning, while broader surveys place Glaspell alongside other American women playwrights or figures such as Eugene O'Neill to situate her within American dramatic history.
A strong essay on Glaspell anchors its thesis in close textual evidence — specific objects, dialogue, and character actions — rather than broad claims about gender. Tracing how a single symbol accumulates meaning across a text is often more persuasive than cataloguing many symbols at once. The most common pitfall is treating the feminist argument as self-evident; a compelling essay explains precisely how the text constructs that argument rather than simply asserting it.