Susan Glaspell's Trifles

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Trifles by Susan Glaspell In Glaspell’s “Trifles”, we find Mrs. Wright sitting in a jail cell as a suspect for murdering her husband. In the meantime, the women wait in Mrs. Wrights Kitchen for the men to finish investigating the crime scene, they find many clues to suggest what the method and motives were. While Mrs. Peters was hanging up her jacket she spotted Mrs. Wright’s sewing basket. They found pretty blocks she had been working on to create a “log cabin pattern”. (1391). As Mrs. Hale starts to pull a knot out and resew a block of erratic stitching in the quilt, Mrs. Peters goes to get a piece of paper and string out of the cupboard and finds a bird cage. Admiring the cage and wondering where the canary was they noticed that the door was broken. “Looks as if someone must have been rough with it.” (1392). The women put the cage down on the table and go back to the sewing basket. The women decide to bring the quilt to Mrs. Wright to keep her mind off things. As they go through the sewing basket they find a fancy box with something wrapped up in silk. “It’s the bird. Somebody – wrung – its …show more content…

A log cabin pattern in quilting is arrangements of a repeated single block pattern, which represent the log cabin walls. Just like Mrs. Wright’s life, the pattern of the quilt symbolizes the way she pressed forward to endure another repeated day of isolation surrounded by the same walls in a house that “was down in a hollow” (1392) not even visible from the road. While further examining the pretty blocks Mrs. Hale notices the last block Mrs. Wright was working on and said, “All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It’s all over the place!” (1391). Her bizarre stitching with knots mirrors the way the rope was tied around Mr. Wright’s neck. The women and Ben-Zvi concur, that her erratic stitches in the quilt symbolize the method for the murder

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