Paper Example on Gender Inequality in Susan Glaspell's Play: Mrs. Peters & Mrs. Hale

In the play Susan Glaspell, the author uses characters like Mrs. Peters, who is the wife to the sheriff, Henry Peters and Lewis Hale, a neighbor to Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Mr. Hale is a husband to Mrs. Hale. Glaspell pictures Mrs. Peters as a housewife who does nothing more than just living at home with her husband. Susan Glaspell has mostly concentrated on showing the difference in society's approach to gender (Hilton, 2011). The author displays the woman as merely a subordinate of a man. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale have been given the task of gathering everything that might be important for the imprisoned woman, Mrs. Wright. The reason why women have to do the work is to aid their husbands.

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In the play, she says she understands how a bored housewife lives a lonely life and can do anything if someone hurts their pets. Loneliness is the justification she offers for the suspicion that Mrs. Wright had killed her husband.

Mr. Lewis Hale is a neighbor to Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Lewis is married to Mrs. Hale Glaspell in her play, pictured Mr. Hale as a farmer who lived as a middle-class man. From the play, we read that Lewis Hale had gone to town carrying a load of potatoes earlier that day.

Intersection of class and agency of actions

The social configuration of characters has dramatically impacted on the agency of characters. The social position that Mr. Lewis Hale is in significantly makes him able to decide on how to act. Because Mr. Hale is a farmer who supplies potatoes in the town, he has to walk to the house of his friend only to find things unusual in the house. When Mrs. Wright informs him that he could not talk to Mr. Wright, Lewis Hale insists on knowing why it is not possible to talk to his fellow farmer. The wife to Mr wright insists that Lewis cannot talk to Mr. Wright, and this makes him probe for further explanations as to why it is impossible to see Mr wright. It is out of insisting that Mrs. Wright makes Lewis know that the man is dead.

The social configuration of Mrs. Peters in the play Trifles, also dramatically influences her course of action. The position as a housewife makes her understand the behavior of Mrs. Wright, who is also a housewife. The social position as a subordinate of a man makes the lady able to make reasonable conclusions from the mess in the house of the Wrights. When the ladies find a dead bird in the pet's cage, Mrs. Peters reasons that the husband killed the woman's pet and made Mrs. Wright kill the man.

The position of a woman in society is likely to be the cause of a man's death. The author portrays a woman as the weakest member of the community. All that a woman can do is live at home with only work to make the house tidy and do everything that the husband would like her to. A woman only gets company from pets at home, and this is the reason why Mrs. Peters draws a possible conclusion of what could have happened to Mr. Wright.

The class of a person significantly impacts on the course of action that someone takes. No one is so weak that they can do nothing. If someone feels very weak at one point, they may compensate for the weakness by behaving in a certain way. Those who feel Superior too do can take some actions that may, at times, harm them. In Susan Glaspell's play, the author tells us that the cause of the death of Mr. Wright could be the belief in the supremacy of a man as Mrs. Peters guesses.

The county Attorney and the Sheriff suspect that Mrs. Wright killed her husband because the husband had been making the woman unable to enjoy life. The author justifies that a woman's position has been made to be the lowest one in society. The effect of degrading a woman is that a woman has committed some serious crimes.

References

Hilton, Leon. "Trifles, By Susan Glaspell". Women & Performance: A Journal Of Feminist Theory, vol 21, no. 1, 2011, pp. 147-149. Informa UK Limited, doi:10.1080/0740770x.2011.563045.

Glaspell, Susan. Trifles: a Play in One Act. Baker's Plays, 2010.