Trifles has long been considered a drama about feminism and the prejudice men develop toward women. The female characters play a significant role in the drama because they produced minor evidence to solve a murder case. The women sympathized for Mrs. Wright because they want to find her motivation for killing her husband and covering up for it. Glaspell presents the male characters in the play as being ignorant and in and inability to connect with the women’s ideology. The men patronized and ridiculed the women ideas and characterized their activity in the house as being relatively unimportant. (Holstein 283) They devalued the women and made a valid point that the women were impotent to them. Glaspell uses literal and symbolic references …show more content…
“I guess we’ll go upstairs first- and then out to the barn.” (Glaspell 1082) By the men conducting their investigation up-stair and in the barn first demonstrated a typical male’s behavior and activity. “Nothing here important but kitchen things,” the men thought the kitchen was irrelevant to their investigation. (Glaspell 1082) The men viewed the kitchen as the woman’s territory. Because of their prejudice to particular areas in the house, the investigator misses significant clues and relevant evidence in solving the crime. The men pass on damning evidence, such as the canary in the sewing basket as unimportant and completely overlook some valuable factors. By them passing over relevant information, it helped the women solve the case and come to the resolution about the faith of Mrs. Wright.
Furthermore, Glaspell writing clearly demonstrated the act of women’s empowerment in which the women were secretly able to make their decision. By looking at the detail in the play make one may focus on the behavior and the treatment of women. This play presents a valuable question which focuses on the solidarity of sisterhood, the devaluation and prejudice toward women, and the importance of emotional abuse and domestic oppression of women
The solidarity of sisterhood becomes readily apparent with the women in this play. There are couple indications one could assume that the women form a unity. The first indication is that the women form a bond is because they act through
The other view that Glaspell shows in this play is a sympathy that the reader grows for the women. How they are forced to follow the men. Like when they are asked to get close to the fire, they do it even though Mrs. Peters
In this deeper look into 'Trifles,' Karen goes through the plot and discusses what you should pay more attention too. She describes the symbolism in some of the objects as well as explain the scenes and their little details. Karen finds the difference between male and female perceptions of judgment to be central to the play. She explains that you need to follow the storyline of the women to help solve the case and discusses the differences between a man and a womans world in this time period. Karen shares that she believes the women are going about the case better than the men and she
Trifles, Susan Glaspell’s play written in 1916, reveal concerns of women living in a male dominated society. Glaspell communicates the role that women were expected to play in late 19th century society and the harm that can come of it to women, as well as men. The feminist agenda of Trifles was made obvious, in order to portray the lives of all women who live oppressed under male domination. John and Minnie Wright are two main characters who are never seen; however provide the incident for the play. In this play women are against men, Minnie against her husband, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters against their husband’s, as well as men in general.
In the play Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, the male characters make several assumptions concerning the female characters. These assumptions deal with the way in which the male characters see the female characters, on a purely stereotypical, gender-related level. The stereotypical assumptions made are those of the women being concerned only with trifling things, loyalty to the feminine gender, and of women being subservient to their spouses.
In Susan Glaspell's “Trifles”, the male characters are depicted as being more sensible, logical and all-knowing gender. It is the men in the play who hold the most noteworthy positions, for example, the county attorney and sheriff. They esteem finding the quickest response to Mr. Wright's murder. They would prefer not to squander in attempt to find the mystery, thus they neglect critical subtle elements, for example, the messy kitchen. They expect that it is more critical to assess the room where Mr. Wright was murdered than to break down how Mrs. Wright kept her home or the couple's relationship. In the earliest reference point of the play, the County Attorney
The dialogues between the men and women in “Trifles” are important because they help the reader understand the patriarchal society which does not allow women to have a life of their own. In their dialogue towards the women, the men ridicule women’s roles. As we see this in the beginning of the play, Mr. Hale despises the women because
Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles, weaves a tale of an intriguing murder investigation to determine who did it. Mrs. Wright is suspected of strangling her husband to death. During the investigation the sheriff and squad of detectives are clueless and unable to find any evidence or motive to directly tie Mrs. Wright to the murder. They are baffled as to how he was strangled by a rope while they were supposedly asleep side by side. Glaspell artfully explores gender differences between men and women and the roles they each fulfill in society by focusing on their physicality, their methods of communication and vital to the plot of the play, their powers of observation. In simple terms, the play suggests that men tend to be assertive,
The plot of both Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” and Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House” provides scope for a few scenes that lack the presence of all or any men. These scenes, consisting of communication between the female characters, assist in developing the theme of women openly defying the fact that the society they live in is primarily run by men. All the power and authority in their society, no matter the situation, belongs to the men while the women are simply excluded. The women in these plays defy the norms set by society and manage to evade the expectations of their patriarchal societies.
The reactions in Trifles reveal to the reader how heavily defined gender roles were in the early twentieth century. The two genders quickly form separate bonds with one another in this play. The men of this time dominate every aspect of this story. They make sarcastic jokes at the women when they start to show concern about things that appeared out of the norm in Mrs. Wright’s house. The first thing they noticed is the broken can goods when the Sheriff says, “Well, you can beat the women! Held for murder and worryin’ about her preserves” (Glaspell 1245). This tone of voice reveals how the men did not take the women seriously. They laugh at the women’s idea of trifles but as Phyllis writes, it is “their attentiveness to the "trifles" in her life, the kitchen things considered insignificant by the men, the two women piece together, like patches in a quilt, the
First of all, Glaspell largely examines the repression of women in the 1900s. Women were highly looked down upon by men, and were seen mostly as housekeepers and child bearers, and were definitely not seen as intelligent people. The women in this play prove that the stereotypes against them are completely wrong. The men in this story are sent out to discover the details of a murder, while the women come along to gather some things for Mrs. Wright, who was accused of killing her husband. Throughout the play, the men mock the
Susan Glaspell uses a variety of symbols in her play to demonstrate the stereotypical view and treatment of women by men during the start of the twentieth century. She intricately portrays the female characters in her story as intelligent, but passive due to the fact that males dismiss their ideas and conversations as unimportant. The play, Trifles, uses multiple symbols to show how men fail to recognize the intelligence of women, and oppress the feminists’ way of thinking throughout society.
"Trifles," a one-act play written by Susan Glaspell, is a cleverly written story about a murder and more importantly, it effectively describes the treatment of women during the early 1900s. In the opening scene, we learn a great deal of information about the people of the play and of their opinions. We know that there are five main characters, three men and two women. The weather outside is frighteningly cold, and yet the men enter the warm farmhouse first. The women stand together away from the men, which immediately puts the men against the women. Mrs. Hale?s and Mrs. Peters?s treatment from the men in the play is reflective of the beliefs of that time. These women, aware of
A trifle is something that has little value or importance, and there are many seeming "trifles" in Susan Glaspell's one-act play "Trifles." The irony is that these "trifles" carry more weight and significance than first seems to be the case. Just as Glaspell's play ultimately reveals a sympathetic nature in Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, the evidence that the men investigators fail to observe, because they are blind to the things that have importance to a woman, reveals the identity of the murderer and are, therefore, not really "trifles," after all. Thus, the title of the play has a double-meaning: it refers, satirically, to the way "trifling" way some men perceive women, and it also acts as an ironic gesture to the fact that women are not as "trifling" as these men make them out to be. This paper will analyze setting, characters, plot, stage directions, symbolism, themes and genre to show how Glaspell's "Trifles" is an ironic indictment not of a murderess but rather of the men who push women to such acts.
Susan Glaspell's Trifles can be regarded as a work of feminist literature. The play depicts the life of a woman who has been suppressed, oppressed, and subjugated by a patronizing, patriarchal husband. Mrs. Wright is eventually driven to kill her "hard" (1178) husband who has stifled every last twitch of her identity. Trifles dramatizes the hypocrisy and ingrained discrimination of male-dominated society while simultaneously speaking to the dangers for women who succumb to such hierarchies. Because Mrs. Wright follows the role mapped by her husband and is directed by society's patriarchal expectations, her identity is lost somewhere along the way. However, Mrs. Hale and Mrs.