Trifles

                Susan Glaspell lived from 1876 to 1948. In this time she wrote many plays and other works, but she is most recognized for her play called “Trifles”. “Trifles” is a play that is based on a murder in which a wife has killed her husband, and the men in the play are in search of evidence against her. Although much of the play is about this woman, she remains offstage; which provokes the argument that Glaspell is not simply telling a story, but rather has other intentions that go much deeper. Through the irony and the character’s words and actions in the play, Glaspell speaks out against a patriarchal society.

                Much of the irony in “Trifles” can be related back to the title itself. In the play, a famer by the name of Hale made a comment, “Well. Women are used to worrying over trifles” (Glaspell 915): Thus introducing the meaning of the title, and the irony, into the play. The great irony in the play is the fact that what these men call “trifles” turn out to be most important. While the men were upstairs looking at the crime scene itself, the women were downstairs in the kitchen “where they belonged”, and although the men saw them as useless, unintelligent, and incapable, they were anything but. The women found and took into consideration things such as the broken bird cage, and the helter-skelter stitching of the quilt, and the dead bird they found in a pretty box. And from these pieces of information, they deduced the motive for the murder. Therefore, the irony in the play was that “trifles” were not really “trifles” at all.

                Along with the presentation of irony, Glaspell also uses the characters words and actions to point out the differences in the worlds of men and women in this kind of patriarchal society. We can gather from what the characters say and do/what they say about other characters, that the society was male dominated. Henderson’s comments about the towels being dirty and that Mrs. Wright must not be much of a homemaker are proof to back up that men and women had specific and different duties. The men were the major laborers, who did chores such as tend to the cattle and larger animals and fences and such. Meanwhile, the women took on the role of “homemaker”. Their job was to keep a clean house and preoccupy themselves with mundane activities such as quilting, or things that didn’t require much intelligence.

                The fact that Glaspell made the women out to be the more intelligent of the characters implies that she, most likely, disapproved of the patriarchal social structure, and thought that women were equal, if not surpassing in intelligence to men. Today, she might be called a Feminist. She also, through the actions of the women in the play, seems to encourage other women to bond together and support each other. For example, Mrs. Hale expresses her guilt in the poem when she states, “I could’ve come. I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful – and that’s why I ought to have come” (Glaspell 919). This statement seems to be Glaspell’s way of sending a message to women that it was their duty to be there for each other and stick together in a time when their gender was portrayed as second to men.