Trifles by Susan Glaspell

Explorations of the Text


1. What clues lead the women to conclude that Minnie Wright killed her husband?

The disheveled kitchen, the messy stitching on a quilt and ultimately, the dead bird in a box. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters see that these objects represent a warping of domestic life, they notice Minnie's probable state of mind and concluded the Minnie killed Mr. Wright.

The quilt serves to emphasize Minnie Wright's loneliness as well as the uncertainty of her domestic role. The unfinished quilt indicates her unsatisfied wishes for warmth and love in their household, as temperature again proves a convenient symbol for the happiness of the Wrights' relationship.

The disheveled kitchen and unfinished work tells that Minnie was being disturbed while doing her daily chores. Something serious must have happened to have stopped Minnie from doing her work. The dead bird, a canary, suggests that Minnie Wright killed her husband in revenge for the canary because the canary had a broken neck and Mr. Wright was killed by the neck.


2. How do the men differ from the women? from each other?

In the play "Trifles," in everything from the things they notice to the things they say, men and women behave completely differently. The men seem to have no time for the women and feel that they are focusing on the smaller and unimportant elements of the crime scene or the "trifles" as the name of the play states. Unlike the women, the men overlook the emotional implications of the unbaked bread, half-cleaned towels, and messy stitching on the quilt. The women however, see that these objects represent a warping of domestic life, they notice Minnie's probable state of mind and turn from outside observers of the crime scene to increasingly active investigators albeit their status as mere housewives as opposed to the men who are actual investigators.

Women in this play understand what life is for other 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. The men continues to look for the big clue and dismiss the women's methods knowing that they will never find anything that way. Even at the very end, when the men have found nothing, they make fun of the women once again.


3. What do the men discover? Why did they conclude "Nothing here but kitchen things"? What do the women discover?

The men as investigators did not find anything in the house. When the men observe the troublesome state of the kitchen, they immediately criticize Minnie's homemaking abilities and that is it. To them, the kitchen would hold no clue and they view it as a "trifle" as they proceed to investigate other parts of the house.

Unlike typical male crime solvers, however, the women of Trifles avoid the ruthless search for information that also characterizes Henderson and instead achieve their solution by the seemingly accidental observation of Minnie Wright's kitchen while simultaneously developing a desire to protect rather than condemn the perpetrator.

Susan Glaspell

 

Susan Keating Glaspell was born in 1882 in Davenport, Iowa. She graduated from Drake University and worked as a journalist on the staff of the Des Moines Daily News. When her stories began appearing in magazines such as Harper's and The Ladies' Home Journal, she gave up the newspaper business. In 1915 Glaspell met George Cook, a talented stage director. Together they founded the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Players were a remarkable gathering of actors, directors and writers. The troupe included Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Much of Glaspell's writing is strongly feminist, dealing with the roles that women play, or are forced to play, in society and the relationships between men and women. She wrote more than ten plays for the Provincetown Players, including Women's Honor (1918), Bernice (1919), Inheritors (1921), and The Verge (1922). In 1922 Glaspell married George Cook and moved to New York City, where she continued to write, mostly fiction. In 1931 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House, a play based loosely on the life and family of Emily Dickinson. Glaspell spent the latter part of her life on Cape Cod writing.

Adapted from http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/notread/author.html