Trifles : Susan Glaspell

 

About the playwright

Susan Glaspell (1876 – 1948 started working as a journalist for a local newspaper after her graduation. During her career with a daily, she had reported about the murder of John Hossack. Her one-act play ‘Trifles’  is inspired by this incident. She wrote the play close to a decade after the murder had first come to light. Wife of John Hossack had claimed that she had slain her husband with an ax, was the main accused in the murder case. She was later convicted. However, her conviction was overturned after an appeal. Susan Glaspell was the director of the Midwest Play Bureau for Federal Theatre Project in Chicago for many years.

 

Susan Glaspell has won many awards, including the ‘Pulitzer Prize’. She is also remembered for discovering Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill. In all, she has written fifteen plays.

 

Dramatic Personae

George Henderson: George is a county attorney. He is called in to investigate the murder of John Wright. He is young and a professional, but is also a male chauvinist.

Henry Peters: Mr. Peters is a local sheriff. He is a middle-aged man who is at the house of the deceased to examine the crime scene.

Mrs. Peters: She is the wife of the sheriff. Mrs. Peters is new in town and has no acquaintance with Mrs. Wright. She is sympathetic to the emotional plight of Mrs. Wright.

Lewis Hale: Lewis is a farmer. He is the neighbor of the Wrights. He enters the Wrights’ house to use a telephone, where he finds Mr. Wright strangled, and his wife acting weirdly.

Mrs. Hale: She is the wife of a farmer Lewis. She knows Mrs. Wright from before she had become Mrs. Wright. She dislikes the chauvinism shown by men around her. The playwright had originally played this role.

John Wright: He is the victim of the murderous assault. The story revolves around the motive of his murder. He is a farmer who has neglected his wife’s happiness time and again.

Mrs. Wright: She is Minnie Foster before her marriage to John Wright. Minnie was a happy girl. Post-marriage, Mrs. Wright is a sad woman. She is the prime suspect of the murder investigation.

 

Summary

The play is about the murder investigation of John Wright, who is found dead, strangled by a rope, in the kitchen of his farmhouse. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is found acting strangely by Lewis Hale, their neighbor, when he enters their house hoping to use their telephone. Mrs. Wright informs him that her husband died while she was sleeping. Lewis Hale alerts the local sheriff, Henry Peters.

The play starts with Lewis Hale and Henry Peters entering the kitchen of the Wrights’ farmhouse, the crime scene. They are accompanied by George Henderson, the county attorney. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters stand by the kitchen door. Hale starts to explain to the sheriff and attorney the events that had transpired since he had entered the farmhouse earlier in the evening.

When Mr. Henderson starts looking around the kitchen, he finds a jar containing fruit preserve in the cupboard broken because of the cold and the resulting mess. When Mrs. Peters tells the attorney that Mrs. Wright is worried about it, he responds women, by their nature are worried over trifles.

Henderson’s bickering about women helps Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale bond with one another. On a couple of occasions, Mrs. Hale is also shown defending Mrs. Wright. She also indicates that Mr. Wright was a rather unwelcoming personality.

Mrs. Peters wants to pick up a few things for Mrs. Wright, on her request. Henderson, before going upstairs with the other men, agrees to it only if he is allowed to check all the retrieved items. Mrs. Hale starts rearranging the kitchen to its tidy condition before the men had entered it. She becomes retrospective and speculates that Mrs. Wright was unhappy and sad, unlike Minnie Foster loved to sing. From the odd behavior of the wife since her husband’s murder, she thinks that Mrs. Wright must be the killer. This prompts both the ladies to start their own investigation.

The men, who are also investigating the case, and oblivious to what the ladies are up to, pass a few snide sexist comments along with some patronization. The women find the sewing on a quilt to be wrong and want to fix it. They start looking for a string. Instead, they find an empty birdcage. The hinge on its door is broken. Both of them start wondering what must have happened to the bird within.

When looking through the sewing basket, they find a dead bird canary inside. They notice the head of the bird is in the same condition as that of Mr. Wright. The women decide to hide the box before either the sheriff or attorney comes back.

Understanding the text

 

Answer the following questions.

a. Do you believe that Mrs. Wright killed her husband? Explain.

Certainly, I firmly believe that Mrs. Wright murdered her husband because of his cruel and abusive nature. She did not murder the canary, and the assumption is that her husband carried out that travesty.

b. Do you think Mr. Wright’s death would have been uncovered if Mr. Hale hadn’t stopped by the Wrights’ home?

I think it is possible that if Mr. Hale had not stopped by the farmhouse, the death of Mr. Wright would not have been uncovered for a long time. Few people visited the farmhouse, and Mrs. Wright might have been able to hide the dead body and somehow keep others from discovering her husband's death.

c. Why does Mrs. Hale think that Mrs. Wright’s worries about her preserves indicate her innocence?

Mrs. Hale thinks that Mrs. Wright’s worries about her preserves indicate her innocence. We find Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters collecting items that Minnie Wright has requested from her jail cell, where she is held in connection to the murder of her husband by strangulation. Throughout their own review of the murder scene, the women find clues that illustrate the possibility that Mrs. Wright has probably snapped to the point of not having realized the magnitude of what she has allegedly done. The point in case is the request for her shawl and her apron.

d. How does Mrs. Peters’ homesteading experience connect her to Mrs. Wright?

Mrs. Peters ends up protecting Mrs. Wright by hiding the strangled canary, which could be used as key evidence against her in her murder trial. Although Mrs. Peters is the sheriff's wife and "married to the law," she comes to the same conclusion as Mrs. Wright and ultimately acts on her behalf. 

Mrs. Peters is rather a timid woman, she is afraid to express her opinion and initially looks for justifications for her husband’s and the attorney’s jokes. However, she is more insightful and intuitive than initially seen by Mrs. Hale and the reader, and she eventually comes to defend Minnie and see her as a victim as well. She actually empathizes with Minnie in that she feels a similar dynamic with her own marriage.

 

Mrs. Peters has won over to Minnie's defense when she sees the dead canary. She remembers a time in her childhood when a boy killed her pet cat with a hatchet, and how she would have harmed the boy if she could have. She also remembers how silent her house was after the death of her oldest child and commiserates with Minnie having had to live in the quiet, joyless house, made all the more somber after Mr. Wright killed the singing bird. Thus even though neither woman was a friend of Mrs. Wright's, they feel solidarity with her, either because of regret or empathy.

 

e. How do the women’s perspectives on men differ?

Women’s perspectives on men differ as men are dutiful and are sincerely searching for the evidence in the house where the murder took place but women are just worrying about the trivial matters and when they find the motive behind the murder, the dead canary bird then they become sympathetic to the murderer and hide the evidence.

Reference to the context

Read the extracts from the play given below and answer the questions that follow.

a. “MRS. PETERS :( glancing around). Seems funny to think of a bird here. But she must have had one, or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it?

MRS. HALE: I s’pose maybe the cat got it.”

i. Who does ‘she’ refer to?

ii. What does the word ‘one’ stand for?

iii. What is the full form of “s’pose”

iv. What do you mean when Mrs. Hale says, “the cat got it”?

‘She’ referred to the dialogue extract above is Mrs. Wright.

‘One’ stands for a bird.

The full form of “s’pose” is ‘suppose’

The phrase “the cat got it”, Mrs. Hale implies the cat may have killed the canary bird.

b. “MRS. HALE: Wright was close. …… she used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that— oh, that was thirty years ago.”

i. Why does Mrs. Hale refer to Mrs. Wright as “Minnie Foster”?

ii. What does her description tell you about Mrs. Wright?

iii. What does Mrs. Hale mean by “that was thirty years ago”?

Mrs. Hale refers to Mrs. Wright as Minnie Foster because she was known by her name before her marriage with Mr. Wright. Mrs. Hale remembers Minnie for her youthful innocence and happiness before she was married. Minnie was a happy girl. Post-marriage, Mrs. Wright is a sad woman. She is the prime suspect of the murder investigation

Mrs. Hale says that Minnie Foster was a lively young girl when she was unwed. Mrs. Hale knew Mrs. Wright many years previous to the day of the story, when she was Minnie Foster. Mrs. Hale remembers Minnie as being a bright and cheerful woman before her marriage, one who enjoyed singing in the choir. When Mrs. Hale realizes how lonely Mrs. Wright was in her marriage to the taciturn John Wright, and realizes with regret that she never visited Minnie or befriended her, she feels somewhat responsible for what has happened. She understands that Mr. Wright must have wrung the bird's neck, and snapped the music and joy in his wife by his harsh and abusive actions.

Mrs. Hale means to say that Mrs. Wright was a lively girl before her marriage with Mr. Wright almost thirty years ago.

 

c. What is the main theme of the play?

The main themes in the plays are gender, isolation, and justice.

Gender: The male characters only want to gather evidence of Minnie's crime, whereas the women come to understand the emotional pain that drove Minnie to murder her husband. It defines how the characters behave, illustrating the differences between men and women.

Isolation: Minnie Wright is isolated from her friends and family by her controlling, abusive husband. This has devastating psychological effects on Minnie.

Justice: The men and women have different conceptions of justice. The men want Minnie to be convicted of murder, whereas the women hide the evidence that would have convicted Minnie out of respect for the years of abuse Minnie suffered.

d. Discuss the symbolism used in the play.

The setting of a story is the physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs. The setting can also set the mood of the story, which will help readers to get a better idea of what is happening in the context of the play. The major elements of the setting are the time, place, and social environment that frame the characters. The play portrays a gloomy, dark, and lonely setting and a series of symbolic objects to help the audience get a better understanding of the characters. The three major symbols used are birdcage, a bird, and rope.

The birdcage represents how Mrs. Wright was trapped in her marriage, and could not escape it. Its door is broken which represents her broken marriage to Mr. Wright. It also represents how Mrs. Wright attempt to escape her marriage from Mr. Wright. When the door is open it allows Mrs. Wright to become a free woman. At one point in time, the cage door used to have a lock that locked the bird inside it. This represents how Mr. Wright kept Mrs. Wright locked up from society. Mr. Wright knew that by keeping Mrs. Wright locked up, she would never be able to tell anyone how he really acted. Mr. Wright was very cruel to his wife.

Another symbolic object was a bird. The bird represents Mrs. Wright, a lovely yet shy woman. Mrs. Hale even explained to Mrs. Peters that Mrs. Wright was kind of like a bird herself, real sweet, and pretty, but kind of timid and fluttery. When Mrs. Wright was Minnie Foster she sang in one of the town’s girls’ singing choir which represents the bird since it used to sing beautifully like Minnie when in freedom.

The rope symbolizes death and destruction. When Mr. Wright was killed, he was choked to death with a rope. The same way Mrs. Wright was forced to live in limited space and freedom like her bird.

There are other symbols as well like Mrs. Wright's rocking chair, the jars of preserves, the quilt, and the knot. The rocking chair stands for the restless mind of Mrs. Wright. Similarly, the preserves are symbolic of all the "woman's work" that the men constantly disrespect throughout the play. The play ends with Mrs. Hale saying they know who the real killer is and the court will knot around Mr. Wright’s neck as punishment. Also when a person knots a quilt, he or she uses fewer stitches, sewing together all layers at once and then securing the stitching with a knot at the end.

e. Discuss the setting of the play. Does it have an impact on the theme of the play?

The setting is important to the development of the play. It takes place during the winter months in 1916, on a farm owned by the victim of apparent strangulation. The play being a one-act play concerns about the murder of Mr. Wright, an abusive husband who was killed by his wife, Mrs. Wright. The characters of the story intend to piece together the events that led up to the death, and they do so by exploring the singular and confined setting of the play.

The play is not subjected to a great deal of change in the course of its development. Specifically, the entirety of the action takes place in a rural house. Furthermore, the scenes are almost entirely relegated to the kitchen of the house. The kitchen is in a state of disarray, with several exploded food cans and dishes dirtying the area. The style of kitchen is typical of one in the early 1900s, and the extreme mess that juxtaposes with the clean and pristine stereotype of a kitchen of this type indicates the rage that must have been building in Minnie Wright during the events leading up to the play. As she was never allowed an outlet, she repressed her feelings for many years, with only her close friend.

The play is about an investigation looking into the death of the farm owner led by sheriff Henry Peters whose only suspect is Wright’s wife Minnie. Sheriff Peters is assisted in his investigation by his wife, Mrs. Peters, Wright’s neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Hale, and George Henderson, the prosecuting attorney in the possible murder of Mr. Wright. The playwright implies that Mrs. Wright killed her husband because he strangled her canary but the women in the story help to cover it up. It is never proven that she had anything to do with his death.

The happiness of Mrs. Wright seemed to disappear as soon as she was married. She was not allowed to have friends or contact with the outside world. Being lonely with her abusive husband, living on an even lonelier farm and possibly no friends probably did help her come out of her loneliness. After the only bit of happiness she had was taken from her she had nothing holding her back. The canary was the only thing keeping Mr. Wright alive.

Thus the storyline revolves around a murder and it successfully provides a perspective about the plight of contemporary women, and gives the scope of their status in society.

 

Reference beyond the text

a. The credibility of a character is determined not only by the character’s thoughts and actions but also by what other characters say and think about him or her. Discuss in relation to the characters of Trifles.

The credibility of a character is determined not only by the character’s thoughts and actions but also by what other characters say and think about him or her. The play is about the murder investigation of John Wright, who is found dead, strangled by a rope, in the kitchen of his farmhouse. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is found acting strangely by Lewis Hale, their neighbor when he enters their house hoping to use their telephone. Mrs. Wright informs him that her husband died while she was sleeping. Lewis Hale alerts the local sheriff, Henry Peters.

The play starts with Lewis Hale and Henry Peters entering the kitchen of the Wrights’ farmhouse, the crime scene. They are accompanied by George Henderson, the county attorney. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters stand by the kitchen door. Hale starts to explain to the sheriff and attorney the events that had transpired since he had entered the farmhouse earlier in the evening.

When Mr. Henderson starts looking around the kitchen, he finds a jar containing fruit preserve in the cupboard broken because of the cold and the resulting mess. When Mrs. Peters tells the attorney that Mrs. Wright is worried about it, he responds women, by their nature are worried over trifles.

Henderson’s bickering about women helps Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale bond with one another. On a couple of occasions, Mrs. Hale is also shown defending Mrs. Wright. She also indicates that Mr. Wright was a rather unwelcoming personality.

Mrs. Peters wants to pick up a few things for Mrs. Wright, on her request. Henderson, before going upstairs with the other men, agrees to it only if he is allowed to check all the retrieved items. Mrs. Hale starts rearranging the kitchen to its tidy condition before the men had entered it. She becomes retrospective and speculates that Mrs. Wright was unhappy and sad, unlike Minnie Foster loved to sing. From the odd behavior of the wife since her husband’s murder, she thinks that Mrs. Wright must be the killer. This prompts both the ladies to start their own investigation.

The men, who are also investigating the case, and oblivious to what the ladies are up to, pass a few snide sexist comments along with some patronization. The women find the sewing on a quilt to be wrong and want to fix it. They start looking for a string. Instead, they find an empty birdcage. The hinge on its door is broken. Both of them start wondering what must have happened to the bird within.

When looking through the sewing basket, they find a dead bird canary inside. They notice the head of the bird is in the same condition as that of Mr. Wright. The women decide to hide the box before either the sheriff or attorney comes back.

 

b. Dramatic irony occurs when the reader or audience has information that is unknown to the characters in a play; it creates tension and suspense. Analyze the play discussing the author’s use of dramatic irony based on these questions:

l What information is crucial to the play Trifles?

The titular "trifles" in Glaspell's play are the small, seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence that reveal Mrs. Wright's motivation to kill her husband. The trifles include Mrs. Wright's frozen preserves, her erratic stitching, the broken birdcage, and the dead canary.

l How does the playwright use this information to create dramatic irony?

Writers use various literary techniques to make their writing more effective. One method is dramatic irony, which occurs when the audience or reader understands a concept or situation that the characters do not. Dramatic irony illustrates the impact of misconceptions, adding depth to a story. One effective use of dramatic irony occurs in the play when the two female characters discover a dead bird, a clue to a murder that remains unknown to other key characters in the play.

l What effect does the dramatic irony have on the audience and on the play?

The dramatic irony is observed in the women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, when they find clues about life in the Wright household. They discover the dead canary and note that someone appears to have broken its neck. The women know how much Mrs. Wright loved the bird, so they and the audience should make the assumption that Mr. Wright killed it. This deduction together with the other evidence of Mrs. Wright's growing instability, (like the terrible sewing) leads the women and audience to believe in Mrs. Wright's guilt and the reason she killed her husband. This situation represents dramatic irony because the sheriff and county attorney remain oblivious to these clues, so the audience knows more than they do about the crime. In an ironic twist, the audience knows that the women have solved the murder mystery while the men remain oblivious of the truth because of their false assumptions about women.

How do you feel about the gender rules shown through language in this play?

In the play, the men believe that they grant female identity by virtue of the women's relation to men rather than through their inherent qualities as females. Except for the absent Minnie Wright, the women have no first name and take their husband's last names, This institutionalized male superiority is so pervasive that the men feel comfortable in disparaging Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale's interest in "trifles," with the clear implication that the women are too flighty and small-minded to worry about important issues such as the investigation at hand.

 

In addition, when the men observe the troublesome state of the kitchen, they immediately conclude that the woman must be at fault in her homemaking abilities because they all know John Wright as a good, dutiful man and in consequence form a unified front protecting John Wright's reputation. Because of this male solidarity, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale can only aid Mrs. Wright if they ally with their own gender.

The inferiority of women in this play is through body language. They stand close together. From the very first part, they are somewhat timid in their place. As the drama goes on, each time the men seem to criticize Mrs. Wright, the women move closer together physically. This shows the bond of women in understanding how they are viewed by men. In this play, the characters can empathize so much with Mrs. Wright that they end up hiding the evidence of the murder (the dead bird) and take justice into their own hands by letting her off the hook. Women understand the plight of women. The men completely do not understand. They assume that their way of solving the crime is the best way and are completely uninterested in all the "clues" that the women turn up. They are also completely uninterested in emotional response, which the women are in tune with. They feel sorry for Mrs. Wright that her preserves have been broken. One of the women remembers how hot it was on the day she made her preserves. They feel sorry for the death of the bird as they remember how terrible it was to have something you loved taken away from you.

The principal difference between men and women implied throughout the play is that the men are powerful and have become stupid and lazy. The women have no power except that of intelligence, which allows them to manipulate the men. Intelligence is of more use than power in solving a crime, however. Indeed, the men do not know what they are looking for, since a moment's reflection would tell them that all clues are trifles. It is in the nature of a clue to be trifling; otherwise, it would not have been left behind. The women ingeniously piece together a puzzle from trifles to arrive at the truth.

 

Discuss the character of Mrs. Wright in the play Trifles

Born Minnie Foster, she used to be a happy, lively girl who sang in the local choir, but after she married John Wright, her life became unhappy and forlorn. Although she does not appear in the play, she is the main suspect in her husband's murder and sends Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale to collect a few minor items for her from the farmhouse.

However, after marriage, Minnie became timid, sad, and isolated. (It is interesting that even Minnie’s name connects her to a sense of smallness and powerlessness: “mini”.) Minnie killed her husband by strangling him in retribution for his final cruelness of killing her a pet bird, the only being that provided happiness and company for her in the loneliness of her home and the patriarchal society that isolated her and all women.

 

 Discuss the social oppression of women in the play Trifles

The play presents a world of strict gender roles, in which the men occupy the sphere of work while the women exist solely in the home. Yet the separation of men’s and women’s spheres is not merely one of a division of labor, rather the play portrays a world, dominated by men, in which social expectations and restrictions have essentially confined women to the home and bound them to their husbands, with little control or identity of their own. For instance, the county attorney George Henderson and the sheriff Henry Peters emphasize Minnie Wright’s role as a housekeeper and feel free to judge her shortcomings in this area. The main characters of the play, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, are identified solely by their husbands’ last names. Minnie is the only woman in the play to get the first name, but this name only emphasizes how she is transformed by marriage, losing possession of her very self, when she marries and goes from Minnie Foster to Minnie Wright. Minnie’s situation is an extreme one, completely isolated at home and without children, but her isolation is merely a difference of degree from that of other women. Both of the other women in the play can understand Minnie’s situation because it is just an amplification of their own. While the men socialize through their work and in the world, the women are stuck at home by themselves.

But the oppression of women displayed within the play goes even further. The male-dominated society does not just lock women into lonely lives and leave them dependent on their husbands. Those very men also fail to recognize their role in oppressing the women. As a result, the men belittle the women, mocking their character, intelligence, and subservience. The men laugh at the women for their emphasis on “trifles,” the small needs of housekeeping and comfort, even when those things are all the men allow the women to have. The men have not only oppressed the women, but they also blame the women for enjoying the only things their oppression allows them to have.

At the beginning of the play, the women too seem to accept the gender roles that oppress them as something of natural world order. However, as the play progresses, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters come to recognize that, as women, they are being oppressed (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they come to acknowledge what they already secretly recognized). In Minnie’s dead bird – a bird strangled by her husband – they see their own strangled hopes, perhaps even their own strangled lives. And in this joint recognition, they find a connection between themselves and with other women, and begin, in their own quiet yet profound way, to rebel.