TRIFLES - Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell was born in 1876 and raised in rural Iowa. Despite the prevailing opinions of her community, she believed in a woman’s right to education and pursued her studies, enrolling at Drake University where she excelled in the male-dominated debate competitions. After college, Glaspell worked as a journalist covering murder cases. Trifles is based on one case she covered; Glaspell resigned her post after seeing the woman in the case convicted of murdering her abusive husband. She wrote Trifles in 1916. Her play Alison's House (1930) earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931. Glaspell is today recognised as a pioneering feminist writer and America's first important modern female playwright. She died of pneumonia on July 27, 1948.

Historical Context of Trifles

Feminism in the early 20th century focused primarily on practical achievements toward the attainment of legal equality, particularly the fight for women’s suffrage (right to vote) and equal employment. This feminist movement is called First-Wave Feminism, and it introduced the issues and goals of feminism into many conversations and social circles for the first time. Political activists campaigned for women’s suffrage through marches and protests, but the issues of Feminism extended into the literary and artistic spheres, as well. Susan Glaspell’s work addresses larger issues of inequality than the legal agenda proposed by First-Wave Feminism. While a strong Feminist, Glaspell was interested in addressing the complexities of inequality prevalent in the home as well as the public sphere.

About the Play Trifles

Written Date : 1916

Date of Publication: 1916

Genre : Feminist Drama

Setting : The Wright’s farmhouse, rural United States

Antagonistic Force : The patriarchal society in which the women live. 

Characters

Minnie Wright - Wife

John Wright - Husband

George Henderson - County Attorney 

Henry Peters - Sheriff and husband of Mrs. Peters 

Lewis Hale - a neighbouring farmer of the Wrights 

Mrs Peters - Wife of the sheriff 

Mrs Hale - Neighbour to the Wrights and wife of Lewis Hale 

The play Trifles revolves around murder investigation providing a perspective about the status of women in contemporary American society reflecting the male mentality as the dominant gender. 

Trifles accounts the day after Mrs. Wright is arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband. Though the play is about the Wrights and the circumstances of Mr. Wright’s death, Mrs. Wright never appears onstage. The audience learns about her from the perspective of her neighbours and their reactions to items they find inside the Wrights’ home. 

The play examines the relationships between husbands and wives, particularly a marriage that ended in murder. The setting, a messy kitchen, reflects this. The women stand together, highlighting both the way they have been pushed together by their male-dominated society but also, possibly, their loyalty to each other over their husbands, a topic explored in the play.

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. Trifles 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 emphasise 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 a first name

Summary : 

The play opens on the scene of an abandoned farmhouse. The house is in disorder, with various activities interrupted, such as dishes left unwashed and bread prepared but not yet baked. Five people arrive at the house to investigate the scene of a crime, including the county attorney: George Henderson, the local sheriff: Henry Peters, and the neighbour, Lewis Hale, who discovered a murdered man, John Wright, strangled (choked) with a rope in his bed. The men are accompanied by two of their wives, Mrs Peters and Mrs Hale. Mr Hale describes for the country attorney the experience of finding John Wright’s dead body the previous day. He tells the story of arriving at the Wrights’ home the previous day. He had been hoping to convince John Wright to invest in a party line telephone with him, and thought maybe it would help to ask him in front of his wife, though he acknowledges that John paid little attention to what his wife wanted. Mr Hale arrived at the house and found Minnie Wright sitting there in her rocking chair. He describes her as looking out of sorts. Mr Hale asked to see John, and Minnie calmly announced him that he couldn’t because John was dead. When Mr Hale asked what he died of, Minnie said that he died of a rope around his neck (strangled).

Mr Hale describes calling one of his men, going upstairs and finding John Wright’s body. His first instinct, he says, was to remove the rope, but his companion cautioned him to not touch anything and to preserve any evidence. Before leaving, he questioned Minnie Wright about who killed her husband. She said that despite having been sleeping in the bed with him where he was killed, she didn’t wake up when it happened. The county attorney asks what Minnie did when Mr Hale sent for the coroner (medical examiner) to question her, and Mr Hale says she stayed quiet; but when he mentioned that he had originally come to ask about putting in a telephone, Minnie laughed and then looked fearful.

Minnie Wright has been arrested for the crime and is being held until her trial. George Henderson asks Mr Peters if there’s anything in the kitchen that could point out any motive for killing John Wright, but the sheriff dismisses the scene as being unimportant, as being only kitchen things. The county attorney discovers that the mess comes from Minnie’s canning jars of fruit, which have exploded. Mrs Peters and Mrs Hale know that Minnie was worried her canning jars would explode in the cold weather, and her husband, Mr Peters laughs over a woman worrying about fruit when she’s held for murder. Mr Hale says “women are used to worrying over trifles.” The men criticise Minnie’s poor housekeeping, as evidenced by the mess in the kitchen and a dirty towel.

Mr Peters asks George Henderson if his wife can collect a few items to bring to Minnie Wright in jail and the attorney says yes, but that he’d like to see what she’s taking. The men go upstairs to inspect the bedroom and Mrs Peters and Mrs Hale collect items from the kitchen that Minnie requested be brought to her at the jail, including clothes and an apron. Mrs Hale is upset over the men coming into Minnie’s space and accusing her of being a poor housekeeper. The women comment on the strangeness of strangling a man to death when the men had pointed out that there was a gun in the house. 

Mrs Hale recognises in the clothing that Minnie had very little money for herself and that her husband, therefore, must have been particularly tight with money. She wonders if this is why Minnie kept to herself so much and didn’t join in other women’s activities. She remembers the lively girl Minnie used to be when she wore pretty clothes. Mrs. Peters says that Minnie also requested to have an apron brought to her, and thinks this is a funny thing to want. Abruptly, Mrs Hale asks Mrs Peters if she thinks that Minnie killed her husband. Mrs Hale says she doesn’t think that she did. Mrs Peters whispers that her husband said that it doesn’t look good for Minnie. The women acknowledge the strangeness of killing a man in the way that John Wright was murdered, strangled in his sleep. Mrs Peters says that George Henderson said the men are looking primarily for evidence that would show a motive for killing John.

The women discover a quilt that Minnie Wright was in the process of making.The women admire a quilt that Minnie was working on, and are wondering if she was going to finish it by “quilting” or "knotting” when the men re-enter and, overhearing the women talking, joke about the women’s trivial (unimportant) concerns at a time like this. Once again left alone by the men, the women notice that some of the stitching of the quilt is very poor, and Mrs Hale starts pulling out stitches to correct them. It seems to the women that Minnie must have been nervous or upset.

Mrs Peters looks for paper or string to package up the clothes they’re taking to the jail. The women then find a birdcage in a cupboard without any bird in it. Mrs Hale doesn’t know whether Minnie had a bird, but remembers that she used to sing very beautifully. They wonder what happened to the bird from the empty cage. Mrs Hale wonders if the cat got it, but Mrs. Peters knows that Minnie didn’t have a cat because she doesn’t like them. The women notice that the cage is broken, the door pulled roughly apart.

Mrs Hale expresses strong regrets having not come to visit Minnie more often in her lonely home, acknowledging that John Wright was a hard man and that it must have been very difficult for Minnie to be alone at her house. She recalls Minnie before she married and how cheerfully she sang in the choir (chorus). Mrs Hale isn’t surprised that Minnie would have wanted a bird in her lonely house. 

Mrs. Hale starts to tell about Minnie as a girl (back when she was Minnie Foster). She says that Minnie Foster was a sweet and timid girl but changed when she married Mr Wright into a timid and unhappy woman. As the women were looking for her sewing materials, Mrs Hale notices a fancy red box, opens it, and the women discover the body of the dead bird. The dead bird’s neck is twisted and the women realise that someone must have wrung its neck. 

When the men return, Mrs Hale hides the box the dead bird under the quilt.  The attorney acknowledges the birdcage and the women quickly say that they think the cat must have got the bird. The men go upstairs again.Once the men leave again, Mrs Peters says that she remembers a kitten she had as a young girl, and that a boy killed it before her eyes. She says she would have hurt him if she could. Mrs Hale says she knows John Wright must have killed the bird. Mrs Peters, growing emotional, tries insisting that they don’t know who killed John Wright. Mrs Hale says it must have been awful to have no children, to have a bird to sing and then to have that bird be still. Mrs Peters is transported into memory again as she recalls knowing what stillness was after her first child died.

Mrs Peters comes to her senses and reminds Mrs Hale that, “the law has got to punish crime.” Mrs Hale cries out in response that her failure to visit Minnie and her lack of support for the isolated girl was a crime, and “who’s going to punish that?”

The women then overhear the men talking as they come down the stairs. George Henderson is saying that the murder is all perfectly clear except for a motive, a reason for killing John Wright in such a strange way. The attorney says he’ll stay at the house longer and go over everything again.

The sheriff, Mr Peters asks if the county attorney wants to take a look at the items Mrs Peters is bringing to Minnie at the jail. He says that Mrs Peters doesn’t need supervising and assumes the things she’s taking aren’t harmful (“a sheriff’s wife is married to the law”). 

The men leave the room momentarily and Mrs Peters tries to hide the box with the dead bird in her small bag and then Mrs Hale conceals it in her pocket. The attorney returns and jokingly acknowledges that at least they found out Minnie wasn’t going to finish her quilt by quilting it. He appeals to the ladies for the correct term for she was going to finish it. She was going to “knot it,” Mrs Hale says, with her hand over her pocket.

Watch this summary Here

References : 

Champlin, Nikola. "Trifles." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC,  8 May 2015. Web. 27 May 2021.

Curriculum Development Centre. (2020). English Grade 11. Sanothimi, Bhaktapur: Government of Nepal, Curriculum Development Centre.

Wang, Bella. Chazelle, Damien ed. "Trifles Study Guide". GradeSaver, 31 August 2009 Web. 27 May 2021.