Trifles by Suzan Glaspell Essay Example

"Trifles" is a play by Susan Glaspell that is based on American farmwives who were living in America in a time when women had minimal rights. The farmwives undergo various forms of oppression, but the play is twisted and grim in several scenes. the production takes the audience in a transitory movement from one scenic view to another in a manner that makes them craving for more action. For example, in one scene, the farmwives fail to bring a criminal to justice after cracking the case and hiding the evidence from the police. This is despite the husbands of the wives were unable to identify some of the obvious pointers to the fact that crime had occurred in the highlighted scenes. Susan Glaspell is one of the characters in the play, and she acts as Mrs. Hales. She is one of the major characters upon which the plot of the movie evolves to produce what remains as one of the best investigative movies of its time. The suspect in the police case is Minnie, and she is accused of killing her husband, John Wright, who is a farmhouse owner. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters hid the evidence since they knew that Minnie was in an abusive marriage; sharing this evidence, according to them would somehow be an act of betrayal on their friend and an associate. The essay will discuss the perception of the "rifles" from the viewpoint of men and women in the play and their thematic importance.

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The "trifles" in the play are the evidence in the kitchen which were comprised of a quilt with erratic stitching, a birdcage and a dead canary which was in a little box (Noh 264). The choice of the kitchen as the core center of attention is an indictment of the role that Minnie played in the crime against her husband. The "trifles" are important items which provided the purpose for which the police spent their time searching upstairs. They ignored the kitchen stating that it did not have any important thing. The women, Mrs. Hales, and Mrs. Peters are left to search the kitchen to attend to the broken jars of preserves (Glaspell 6). In what seems to be a distraction to the proceeding in the play, the two women's intuition is triggered by the sore arrangement of items in the kitchen; indeed there were struggles in the kitchen. The men assume that women should always be left to "worry over the trifles" and they head on upstairs to search for concrete evidence; this ends up giving the two women to conceal the very evidence that could have gone in a long way unearthing what remains one of the greatest murder so cruel scenes. As the women attend to the kitchen, they identify a quilt, a cloth sewing, a dead canary and a birdcage which had a broken door. These items are the trifles that the men ignored after failing to enter the kitchen, and the two women discovered them.

The men dismissed the "trifles" in the kitchen, and they decided to examine the crime scene using the usual way that everyone would expect of the police (Noh 265). The men's decision proved t be the biggest mistakes as the audience gets to realize that evidence is always found on the obvious and the most unlikely of places. On the other hand, the women searched the kitchen to look for essential cues since they realized that Mrs. Wright was more likely to spend most of her time in the kitchen. Being women, they knew exactly what to look for and did not indulge in the intensive evidence pursuit that their husbands were entangled on. The men always assumed that the kitchen area is for women and they tasked Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to assess the kitchen (Glaspell 7). The men dismissed all the items that women find significant in life. They also assumed that women were incapable of taking real actions or having any considerable intelligence in the process of searching for viable evidence. This caused them to overlook all the cues that implicated Mrs. Wright to the murder of her husband.

The men view the women as the homemakers of the community, but they assume that they have no real power (Makowsky 422). This presents the theme of a male-dominated society where men are left to attend to the "most significant" things while delegating women to the kitchen setting. The men judge their women depending on how they keep the house. This scene is also the main basis of the irony in the play. The court attorney asks the sheriff, "You're convinced that there was nothing important here--nothing that would point to any motive?" and the sheriff responds saying, "Nothing here but kitchen things " (Glaspell 7).

The "trifles" have several thematic significances in the play. They present the theme of gender by showing the differences between men and women. The male characters in the play have the motive of finding evidence of Mrs. Wright`s crime while the women intend to understand the oppression and emotional suffering that caused Mrs. Wright to kill her husband (Chaisilwattana 13). The play also presents the thematic significance of isolation since it indicates that Mrs. Wright was a lonely housewife who was isolated from her family and friends as a result of being controlled by her husband. The isolation causes her to have an adverse psychological impact.

The theme of different viewpoints of justice among the characters comes up in the play. The men want Mrs. Wright to be convicted of killing her husband while the women hide the "trifles" because they are convinced that Minnie had suffered for a long time while in the hands of her abusive husband (Arciniega 48).The women can see their own lives in Minnie`s suffering, and they understand that the latter was justified to kill her husband in these circumstances. The two women symbolize and represent many other women in the society, and they create awareness about the chances of personal change for women (Ben-Zvi 41). When they decide to hide the trifles, they assume that it was not a crime but a form of justice for the physical and emotional suffering that Mr. Wright had inflicted on his wife.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the "trifles" are the evidence items that Mrs. Hales and Mrs. Peters hid from the male police to protect Mrs. Wright from being convicted of killing her husband. The men ignored the broken jars of preserves since they assumed that they were not important for the case. The women noted that these things were significant since Mrs. Wright spent most of her time in the kitchen. The "trifles" present the thematic significance of different viewpoints of justice, gender differences between men and women and isolation.

Works Cited

Arciniega, Lourdes. "Home as an Activist and Feminist Stage: Women's Performative Agency in the Drama of Susan Glaspell." Performing Dream Homes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. 45-64.

Ben-Zvi, Linda. "A Different Kind of the Same Thing": The Early One-Act Plays of Susan Glaspell and JM Synge." The Eugene O'Neill Review 39.1 (2018): 33-47.

Chaisilwattana, Yuwapa, et al. "The Housewife and the Stage: A Study of Domestic Space and Homemaking in Susan Glaspell's Trifles." Journal of Liberal Arts 15.2 (2015): 1-23.Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Baker's Plays, 2010.

Makowsky, Veronica. "Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion by Emeline Jouve." Comparative Drama 51.3 (2017): 421-423.

Noh, Aegyung. "Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion by Emeline Jouve." Theatre Journal 70.2 (2018): 264-265.