Glaspell Trifles, Essay Example

Susan Glaspell’s Feminist Perspective in Trifles

 Susan Glaspell’s (1876-1948) most widely known plays, Trifles (1916) is her retelling of a real life crime she covered in Iowa during her early days as a newspaper reporter (Bendel-Simso, 1999). Several feminist themes emerge from Susan Glaspell’s most famous short story. First is the theme of apparent male dominance in society during the time in which the play is set. Early on, it is obvious that Mrs. Wright is the only suspect, so the men are at the home to look for evidence that would make her more culpable. All they need is a strong motive that would tie her up at trial for a conviction. The women, the “weaker” sex, are relegated to gathering a few of Mrs. Wright’s things so that she might have them while she waited in jail. As the dramatic actions unfold, it is clear that the women are the only ones who are finding evidence as the men make occasional passes by them, accompanied by comments that belittle their importance to the case. For example, they laugh as they hear the ladies trying to discern whether Mrs. Wright was going to “quilt” or “knot” her current quilting project. Further, they find it humorous that the ladies would ask them if they wanted to inspect the things they had accumulated to take to Mrs. Wright in jail. A sheriff’s wife is “married to the law,” they say. .

Another pronounced theme is the imagery of feminine “voice” as it relates to Mrs. Wright and her canary. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale speak of a time, twenty years before, when Mrs. Wright, née Minnie Foster, who had a fine singing voice, sang in the local church choir before her marriage. Since her marriage to Mr. Wright, a “hard man,” her voice had been silenced as she became more reclusive with the passage of time. The investigating women at the Wright home learn, deductively, that Mrs. Wright had a canary, and that canary’s cage had been torn from one of its hinges, and that the canary’s neck had been broken. They discovered it carefully placed inside a childhood treasure box that Mrs. Wright had kept in her sewing bin. The box represents the promise of her earlier days. The presence of the canary there is significant, because it shows the end of the pet that sang for her long after she could no longer sing for herself. The fact the Mr. Wright had been strangled to death is symbolic that he, too, could no longer use his voice to usurp her will. By causing us to enter the world of these women as they struggle to connect with each other and to grab an equal social footing with men, Glaspell draws a serious portrait of psychological dimension (Kastleman, 2010).

A third feminist theme surrounds the dilemma of doing what is right, even if doing what is right is not considered to be proper protocol. What is meant by this is that the women eventually know Mrs. Wright is guilty, and, because of their own life experiences of childhood torment and human loss, they find themselves unable to use their own voices to openly accuse Mrs. Wright of any wrongdoing. In the latter stages of the drama they communicate more with looks than with words. They tacitly understand that they cannot say aloud what they are thinking. They realize how ordinary things such as the Wright’s disorderly abode, spoiled fruit in canning jars, half filled kitchen canisters, and errant sewing stitches point to a woman who was disappointed with her life and reached the breaking point with the continual subjection she endured from her cruel husband. Cut off and completely alone, she lived without close neighbors, without a party line telephone, and they came to know that she could not live without the bird she had come to love. What did Minnie Foster Wright do? She killed her husband in a fit of retaliation. Actually, the women who occupied her home after her removal from it decided that her killing of her husband was more of a punishment than it was a crime (Kanthak, 2003). What did Minnie deserve? She deserved to be let go, released from her cage as it were, and given the freedom to fly that was denied her dear bird.

References

Bendel-Simso, M. (1999). Twelve Good Men or Two Good Women: Concepts of Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers.’ Studies in Short Fiction, 36(3), 291-     297.

Kanthak, J. (2003). Feminisms in motion: Pushing the “wild zone” thesis into the fourth  dimension. Literature and Interpretation Theory, 14, 149-163.

Kastleman, R. (2010). A silenced woman. American Theatre, 27(2), 19.