Alexandra Quinn
Susan Glaspell’s Trifles: The Conveyance of Womanhood
In the era around the 1910’s, there was a clear and noticeable distinction between the perception of men and women in the eyes of society. The earliest encounters of women fighting for suffrage and equal rights were taking place around the time that the one act play Trifles was introduced in 1916. It was not until 1919 that congress granted women the right to vote; a mere three years post production. Throughout the play, it is a clear conception that women derive their identity through their relationships to their husbands and those men who have authority. One of the characters Mr. Henderson, the county attorney, stated that because Mrs. Peters is married to the sheriff of the town she is indisputably married to ‘the law’. This type of view upheld by men around this time period was not only common but seen by men as appropriate to a woman’s status. Delving further into this issue, one character in the play, Mrs. Hale, showcases how women should be recognized for their intrinsic female qualities, and should not be defined by their male counterparts.
Trifles begins as the murder mystery of Mr. Wright’s strangulated demise, in which Mr. Peters, Mrs. Peters, Mr. Hale, and Mrs. Hale are investigating. The most apparent suspect is of course Minnie Wright, due to the fact that she was sleeping in the same bed as her husband when
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the ‘murderer’ took his life with a rope in the middle of the night. As the plot unfolds, the men hold true to their duty of justice and use an iron fist approach in applying the law to this case. The only character that criticizes the men’s black and white attitude from the opening of Trifles is Mrs. Hale, whom states that, “Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.” This quote can be construed to mean she does not believe a man’s authority should necessarily take superiority over her status as a woman, just because of her gender. It can be...