The play "Trifles", by Susan Glaspell , is an examination of the points of view of the early 1900s against women and equality. The most noticeable theme in this story is men discrediting women's intelligence and their ability to do a man’s job, as detectives, in the story. A less noticeable theme is the sympathy the women in the plot find for each other.
Examining the play from this viewpoint we see a diverse set of characters, a plot, and a final act of sacrifice. The three main characters, Mrs. Hale, the sheriff’s wife Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Wright are an outcome of a tyrannical society which denies them their right to speak and think freely. In the case of Mrs. Wright, it also denies her the right to be happy and free, not only from jail but also from the prison her husband created for her. Once they are left alone, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are able to find clues to the cause for the murder from their detailed knowledge of being simple housewives to which the men are completely ignorant. They also are forced to find compassion for Mrs. Wright as they compare their own experiences to the clues they find out about her life. At the beginning of the play, the two women are not taking a very active part in the play. In fact, they seem a little unsettled to be on the scene of a murder, their only words as they stand by the door on a cold night are "I'm not - cold." The women don’t start participating in the story until Mr. Henderson finds the broken fruit preserves jars in the cabinets.
Then we see the women’s initial protection of Mrs. Wright. After the attorney makes a joke, "Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves.", he tries to clean his hands but can’t find a clean towel. He comments on Mrs. Wright to the ladies, "N...
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...ing the box with the strangled bird and hiding it from the men in an attempt to save Mrs. Wright. The feeling of togetherness that the ladies have encountered with one another including Mrs. Wright is declared by Mrs. Hale in the last line of the play. "We call it - knot it, Mr. Henderson." This line has a double meaning. The first being that the women were tied together by their synonymous connection of living in a world controlled by man, where men think women are good only for petty activities and taking care of the household’s chores, and second, that they are united by their common bond of fighting for each other. The reference to knotting the quilt given by Mrs. Hale can also be interpreted as an indication to knotting Mr. Wright's neck. This final remark shows the determination of women in that time to fight for equal rights, no matter what the moral cost.
Trifles is a play that shows clearly how women were treated and ridiculed by men in the 1900’s. It is a one-act play that took place at the farmhouse of John Wright.
Mrs. Wright, however, justified killing her husband due to Mr. Wright trapping her inside the house and how Mrs. Wright job is only to be domestic wife. When Mrs. Hale (farmer’s wife) and Mrs. Peters (sheriff’s wife) discovered a dead bird with her neck bruised all over, they start to put the pieces to the puzzle together and ...
In a play, the audience should be intrigued and ready for what is to come next. It is a play that works by understanding. It has the audience on their seat to make them be part of the play. Susan Glaspell wrote a play based on an actual murder. “In the process of completing research for a biography of Susan Glaspell, [she] discovered the historical source upon which Trifles ...Glaspell covered the case and the subsequent trial when she was a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News”(Ben-Zvi 143). In the early nineteen-hundreds women were seen as weak. They were females knew the understanding of every clue that was leading to the case and the reasoning behind it.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
Another symbolic part of the play is when the men overhear the women talking about Mrs. Wright’s quilt, wondering if she was going to quilt it or knot it, and they laugh at them. Mrs. Hale is immediately offended by the way they laughed at them where Mrs. Peters is apologizing for them because "they have a lot on their minds".
Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, was written in 1916, reflects the author’s concern with stereotypical concepts of gender and sex roles of that time period. As the title of the play implies, the concerns of women are often considered to be nothing more than unimportant issues that have little or no value to the true work of society, which is being performed by men. The men who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable to solve the mystery through their supposed superior knowledge. Instead, two women are able decipher evidence that the men overlook because all of the clues are entrenched in household items that are familiar mainly to women during this era. Glaspell expertly uses gender characterization, setting, a great deal of symbolism and both dramatic and verbal irony, to expose social divisions created by strict gender roles, specifically, that women were limited to the household and that their contributions went disregarded and underappreciated.
We see verbal irony in the words exchanged between Hale and the County Attorney. Hale showed how he felt about the women with his statement that “Well, women are used to worrying about trifles” (878). The County Attorney whom is a smarmy politician tries to smooth hurt feelings by saying “And yet with all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?” (878). This is said in a somewhat sweet voice, but one that is obviously somewhat sarcastic. The Sheriff also partakes in sarcasm. When he comes in and the women are discussing the quilt he shows how little he thinks of the competency of the two women with the statement “They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it” (881). This is met with an abundance of laughter by the men and “abashed” (881) expressions by the women. The quilt’s point in this is also a little
Trifles is one play that really shows the conflict between gender roles in the early 20th century. At the beginning of the 1900s the idea of everyone having equal rights didn’t exist. Men clearly dominated every aspect of life, while women were often left with little importance. The oppression of women during that time stretched to the point that they were not truly acknowledge as their own person. Their sole purpose was to take care of their families by keeping house and performing their caretaker duties. According to the essay “Literary Context in Plays: Susan Glaspell” by Bailey McDaniel claims that Glaspell’s work Trifles is considered an observation on the demeaning, insignificant characterization of women’s labor and their lives within domesticity (McDaniel). Susan Glaspell really tries to emphasize this feminist view throughout the entire play.
Trifles is based on a murder in 1916 that Susan Glaspell covered while she was a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News after she graduated from college. At the end of the nineteenth century, the world of literature saw a large increase of female writers. Judith Fetterley believed that there was an extremely diverse and intriguing body of prose literature used during the nineteenth century by American women. The main idea of this type of literature was women and their lives. The reason all of the literature written by women at this time seems so depressing is due to the fact that they had a tendency to incorporate ideas from their own lives into their works. Glaspell's Trifles lives up to this form of literature, especially since it is based on an actual murder she covered. This play is another look at the murder trial through a woman's point of view.
Susan Glaspell's Trifles explores the classical male stereotype of women by declaring that women frequently worry about matters of little, or no importance. This stereotype makes the assumption that only males are concerned with important issues, issues that females would never discuss or confront. The characters spend the entirety of the play searching for clues to solve a murder case. Ironically, the female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, uncover crucial evidence and solve the murder case, not the male characters. The men in the play, the Sheriff, County Attorney, and Hale, search the scene of the crime for evidence on their own, and mock the women's discussions. The women's interest in the quilt, broken bird cage door, and dead canary, all of which are assumed to be unimportant or trifling objects, is what consequentially leads to their solving of the crime. The women are able to discover who the killer is by paying attention to detail, and prove that the items which the men consider insignificant are important after all.
The two females noticed everything around and questioned everything. The find a bird cage and wondered if she owned a bird and it not, what was the bird cage for. Ms. Peters and Mrs. Hale find the bird and notice that the neck had been twisted. Mrs. Hale states how all the women live close together but feel far apart, they all go through the same thing. George Henderson, The County Attorney says that all these things the woman found and were about to take, weren’t relevant to the crime scene because they were things that weren’t dangerous, in other words I believe that he said these things were unrelated to anything that happened that night, because they were things that belonged to a women or mainly because there were small things that during the 20th century wouldn’t hurt a man or a man wouldn’t let himself be taken down, by something so irrelevant. At the end of the story the women conclude that Mr. Wright, killed Mr. Wright the same way he had killed her bird. Mrs. Hale and Ms. Peter decide to hide what they had uncovered about the event that took place that night Mr. Wright was killed. In my opinion the reason they decided to hide all this information was because like they said Mrs. Wright was very happy and her husband was very
In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, a small number of people are at the Wright house trying to figure out why and how Mr. Wright was murdered. Mrs. Wright is already the suspect, and all that is needed for the case is evidence for a motive. The jury needs something to show anger or sudden feeling so that they can convict her for murder. The men, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Peters, and Mr. Hale are there to find the evidence. The women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, are there to pick up a select few items for Mrs. Wright. While the men are going about business and looking for evidence to build a case against Mrs. Wright, the women are looking over what Mrs. Wright left behind and intuitively trying to understand what happened. They are also trying to fathom why Mrs. Wright would be compelled to perform such an act of violence. As the story goes on, it constructs each of the characters in slightly different means. Susan Glaspell presents Mr. Wright and Mrs. Hale as having contrasting and comparable characteristics. While Mrs. Hale and Mr. Wright differ in terms of emotions, they are similar in their cleanliness and are well respected by others.
Susan Glaspell's play, "Trifles", attempts to define one of the main behavioral differences between man and woman. For most of the story, the two genders are not only geographically separated, but also separated in thought processes and motive, so that the reader might readily make comparisons between the two genders. Glaspell not only verbally acknowledges this behavioral difference in the play, but also demonstrates it through the characters' actions and the turns of the plot. The timid and overlooked women who appear in the beginning of the play eventually become the delicate detectives who, discounted by the men, discover all of the clues that display a female to be the disillusioned murderer of her (not so dearly) departed husband. Meanwhile, the men in the play not only arrogantly overlook the "trifling" clues that the women find that point to the murderer, but also underestimate the murderer herself. "These were trifles to the men but in reality they told the story and only the women could see that (Erin Williams)". The women seem to be the insightful unsung heroes while the men remain outwardly in charge, but sadly ignorant.
Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), is a play that accounts for imprisonment and loneliness of women in a patriarchal society. The plot has several instances where women issues are perceived to be mere trifles by their male counterparts. The title is of significant importance in supporting the main theme of the story and developing the plot that leads to the evidence of the mysterious murder. Trifles can be defined as things of less importance; in this story dramatic, verbal and situational irony is used to show how the insignificant trifles lead to a great deal of truth in a crime scene investigation. The title of the story “Trifles” is used ironically to shape the unexpected evidence discovered by women in
One woman’s Trifles is another man’s clues. The play Trifles, was written by Susan Glaspell based on the murder of John Hossack, which Susan reported on while working as a news journalist for Des Moines Daily News. Susan Glaspell was an American Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, actress, novelist, journalist, and founder of the Provincetown Players. She has written nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography. At 21 she enrolled at Drake University even after the prevailing belief that college make women unfit for marriage. But many don’t know that her work was only published after the death of her husband George Cram Cook. Trifles is an example of a feminist drama. The play shows how male dominance was