Old Mother Savage, Trifles, And Wedding At The Cross

Control can be described in many ways, as freedom or restraint. Without the restraint that stability can offer, a person could easily lose direction in life. But a loss of control can also result in anger at those who are perceived to be responsible. In many cases this loss can give rise to a need for revenge without thought for the consequences. In the stories, “Old Mother Savage”, Trifles, and “Wedding at the Cross”, the psychological effects of the loss of control over one’s life manifests itself differently in different people, but ultimately it always results in an attempts to regain a semblance of control through desperate actions which often prove costly.
In “Old Mother Savage”, Mother Savage experiences a loss of control when she receives

news of her son’s death and commits appalling crimes in the name of resolving her loss. De Maupassant writes, “She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet. She thought: ‘There’s Victor killed now.’” (de Maupassant) When Mother Savage is first notified of her son’s death, she experiences a great shock and she is unable to fully process the information which she has been given. Here, she has lost the pretense of control, in which she has previously felt she had. Even while she is forced to house the enemy, the four soldiers allow her a sense of autonomy, pay her respect, and offer companionship. At the news of her son’s death Mother Savage’s world has fallen apart in the matter of moments, and she is left reeling. De Maupassant further expresses Mother Savage’s loss of control, “Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful, torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never again! The gendarmes had killed the father; the Prussians had killed the son.” (de Maupassant) Once the truth of what has happened has finally been processed she is able to feel her momentous loss. Mother Savage’s fractious thoughts run through her head, reliving the trauma of losing her husband and compounding it with the fresh anguish her son’s death. Mother Savage’s reaction to her trauma starts at shock, moves into grief, and settles in anger. Here De Maupassant displays Mother Savage’s fixation and uncontrollable thoughts, “What had they done with his body afterward? They had only let her have her boy back as they brought back her husband – with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!” (de Maupassant) Mother Savage’s loss of control is expressed in her anger at the situation and the people which she perceives as responsible for her pain. She becomes understandably fixated on her two traumas, unable to stop the acrimonious and grief stricken thoughts which run through her head. Mother Savage couldn’t possibly fight the entire Prussian army in order to gain the retribution she feels is needed. As Mother Savage looks for a more attainable outlet for her rage, she settles on the four Prussian soldiers which have served as companions to her. In a final attempt to gain the equilibrium which has escaped her and balance the scales with retribution she brutally murders the four Prussian soldiers burning them alive. As she sits outside watching the house burn to the ground, listening to the men’s screams I imagine she felt a sense of justice and control.
Mrs.

Wright, in Trifles, has lived a very isolated and lonely existence experiences a loss of self-control at the death of her bird; she then commits a desperate act in the hopes that it will bring her the sense of equilibrium that was taken from her. Glaspell explains, “MRS. HALE [Her own feeling not interrupted] If there’d been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still, after the bird was still.” (Glaspell) The bird holds great significance in the life of Mrs. Wright, serving a dual purpose as a friend and entertainer. Without the bird she has only the chores of a farm and her husband who is depicted as a cold and hard man. The bird was perhaps the one bright spot in the life of Mrs. Wright who’s care for it is exhibited in the careful handling of its body. When Mr. Wright kills the bird the slight sense of equilibrium that she had in her life is gone, and without the bird Mrs. Wright is forced back into a life of solitude. The thought of returning to her monotonous and lonely existence without the color that the bird had contributed to her life might have been too much for her to consider. In Glaspell’s depiction of Mrs. Wright after the crime, “” Can’t I see John” “No,” she says, kind o’ dull like. “Ain’t he home?” says I. “Yes,” says she, “he’s home.” “Then why can’t I see him? “I asked her, out of patience. “’Cause he’s dead,” says she. “Dead?” says I. She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth.

“Why—where is he?” says I, not knowing what to say. She just pointed upstairs—like that [himself pointing to the room above].” (Glaspell) We are presented with a Mrs. Wright who seems to have dissociated from the reality of her crime. In Mr. Hale’s description of Mrs. Wright she doesn’t appear to be fearful of the discovery of Mr. Wright’s body. Mr. Wright died because he took something from Mrs. Wright. Mrs. Wright seeks revenge against her husband for the crime that he committed against her and the bird by strangling him in his sleep, not unlike how he once strangled her bird. Glaspell adds, “HALE She moved from that chair to this one over here [pointing to a small chair in the corner] and just sat there with her hands held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come into see if John wanted to put in a telephone, and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared.” (Glaspell) When Mrs. Wright laughs at the absurdity of her husband allowing a telephone in their house we are able to see even deeper into the depths of the isolation which she has experienced. A telephone allows connection to the outside world, something that was long ago taken away from her. When Mr. Hale describes a flash of fear on her face that is perhaps the moment that Mrs. Wrights suffers the realization of the consequences of what she has done. Mr. Wright is dead and his body found, Mrs. Wright is about to be put back in a cage. The revenge that she has taken against her husband has brought her a sense of control which has proven to be fleeting due to the ramifications of her actions.

In “Wedding at the Cross”, Wariuki experiences a feeling of insignificance which stems from a public humiliation he suffers at the hands of her father in law.

This results in him sacrificing his identity in order to conform to a traditionalist ideal in the name of regaining the dignity he has lost. Thiong’o writes, “They made him stand at the door, without offering him a chair, and surveyed him up and down. Wariuki, bewildered, looked alternately to Miriamu and to the wall for possible deliverance. And then when he finally got a chair, he would not look at the parents and the dignitaries invited him to sit in judgment but fixed his eyes to the wall. But he was aware of their naked gaze and condemnation.” (Thiong’o, 1040) It is here that Wariuki suffers incredible embarrassment and, feels for maybe the first time, ashamed of who he is and where he comes from. Wariuki is not a man who has at this point found great worth in material things and instead finds joy in entertaining people. For Miriamu’s father, a well off man, Wariuki is not enough for his daughter. Thiong’o then describes the hold that this experience took on Wariuki, “Wariuki had the one obsessions: to erase the memory of that interview, to lay forever the ghost of those contemptuous eyes.” (Thiong’o, 1042) In response to his embarrassment Wariuki becomes fixated with exacting an emotional revenge on his father in law. Wariuki, all in the name of success and retribution, turns his back on his people in order to

have access to the upper class and the wealth that their association brings him. Thiong’o further explains the lengths to which Wariuki goes, “He now believed, albeit without much conviction, the lies told by the British about imminent prosperity and widening opportunities for flacks. For about a year he remained aloof from the turmoil around, he was only committed to his one consuming passion.” (Thiong’o, 1043) Thiong’o illustrates to us with this quote the dedication to which Wariuki pursues his retribution. Not only is he willing to profit on the misery of an underclass which he once belonged to, but he goes to great lengths to absolve himself of his guilt. Wariuki loses himself entirely, taking on the English name Dodge Livingstone. Little by little Wariuki strips himself on the man he once was and becomes a mirror image of his father in law. All the while he sacrifices his family and the woman whom loves him in order to achieve this goal which has become the sole driving factor in his life. In the end, when Wariuki stands before his father in law, he is a man who embodies everything Miriamu’s father could ever hope for a son in law. Wariuki feels as though the moment, which has haunted him for so long, never happened. Wariuki is almost able to press reset on his life, and through the acceptance of his father in law he has regained his dignity. But this is all lost when Miriamu publicly rejects Wariuki. Wariuki is no longer the man she loved, the kind street performer who entertained and made her laugh. He is now Dodge Livingstone, a ruthless man who she could never love, a man who is everything that she ran from in her father. Just as Wariuki gains the adulation and acceptance he has sought his entire adult life, he suffers a larger blow to his dignity than ever before. The revenge that he fixated on bore fruit, but he also lost the woman who he once loved in the pursuit of it.
In “Old Mother Savage”, Trifles, and “Wedding at the Cross”, there is a theme centered on the loss of control that is consistent throughout the stories. Each of the three characters, Mother Savage, Mrs. Wright, and Wariuki all suffer damaging traumas in their lives that leave them feeling helpless to the world around them. Each one of them seeks to gain the control that they have lost through retaliation for the wrongs they feel they have suffered. While they each ultimately carry out their revenge, it is not without consequence to them and to those who have been caught in the cross hairs of their wrath. This is a lesson that we can all learn, so as not to repeat these mistakes and suffer the direct and indirect ramifications of our actions.