Comparing Trifles And A Doll's House

1590 Words4 Pages

Kyzhee Thompson
English 102
Professor
Spring Semester 2015

A Trifling Paper

The place of gender roles in our society continues to evolve and change. As society as a whole progressively becomes more tolerant to the idea that role conformity often has negative effects, if continues over extended periods of time. To prove this one needs only look to history, it was only in recent years have women have managed to break through the ascribed roles placed upon them at birth. Women have and are attempting to be seen on the same level as their male counterparts, in many respects much of human history has been documented from a patriarchal perspective, not surprising considering that for centuries men have held higher placed in society than women. …show more content…

In Trifles, Glaspell stages the play in Mrs. Wright’s home a day after her husband is murdered. The play takes place after the crime in question has been committed, which doesn't give the audience a clear picture of the events in question. The majority of the play is centered on a conversation between Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, two women who come from the same rural town as the Wright family. The main action of the play revolves around determining whether or not Mrs. Wright really did indeed kill her husband. Glaspell does not give the reader many details regarding the crime, yet there is little doubt that Mrs. Wright didn't kill her husband, but Glaspell paints such a compelling picture that as readers we are compelled to discover why. Trifles is a play about a woman who murders her emotionally and probably physically abusive husband. It is also a tale of two other women, who take justice into their own hands by withholding evidence from their husbands to save an obviously distressed …show more content…

Wright, its neck wrung. A conclusion is formed by the women about how the bird came to die, deciding that the act was committed by Mr. Wright in a fit of anger, the tiny bird was sewn away by Mrs. Wright. Similar to the way Mrs. Wright’s formally free spirit and happy nature, as remarked upon by Mrs. Hale, was cast aside so that she could focus on fulfilling the duties expected of her as a woman. Quite possibly at one point Mrs. Wright may have had a genuine desire to fulfill her duties as a mother, a wife and homemaker, had it not been for the cold and bleak nature of her husband Mr. Wright. Mrs. Hale goes as far as to admit this, if in not so many word, to the County Attorney, Mr. Henderson, when she said “place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it”. Later on Mrs. Hale bring up another woman known as Minnie Foster, the woman Mrs. Wright used to be and how it was that same man she married that wore away every bit of the carefree woman she had been thirty years before. How she was no longer the woman with the beautiful voice who sang in the choir, and definitely not the happy women once seen around town. The last piece of solace that existed in her world was the little canary that would sing to her. Something she had bought a year before the events of Trifles occurred, in an attempt to make her otherwise dreary

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