Susan Glaspell's Trifles Vs. A Jury Of Her Peers

Susan Glaspell, one of the nation’s most widely read novelists, was a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, actress, and journalist. Susan Glaspell wrote two different forms of literature that has basically the same plot. She first wrote the play, “Trifles,” which was about two females being able to solve the mystery as to what the motive of a woman who had killed her husband was. The short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” was adapted from the play and has been preferred by readers due to its richer details. The two pieces of work are extremely similar to one another in almost every aspect. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the play and placed into the short story. Additionally, all the plot points are the same with some insignificant

The play, “Trifles,” has little room for character description or background as it is a short one act play. The audience only knows what they see and hear on the stage or reading the play. On the other hand, the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” adds a lot more detail about the characters and how they feel about each other. For example, the reader gets introduced to the background of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. The reader learns when the two met and how Mrs. Hale felt about Mrs. Peters, Glaspell writes, “she had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife,” (568). This is some description that the reader didn’t get to know about in the play. The reader also gets a better feel for the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Hale in the short story. The reader can see that they are both somewhat annoyed with the way they talk to each other. The first annoyance that is brought about is at the beginning of the short story when Mr. Hale rushes his wife saying, “Martha! Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.” (568). It’s not proper to keep guests waiting in the cold. And then, the reader can see Mrs. Hale’s annoyance when she gets irritated with him for saying things he shouldn’t say or saying things that are completely off the topic. She tries to give him a look but gets interrupted by the county attorney

The play seems somewhat dull compared to the short story, only because of the detail. In, “Trifles,” there is little to no description of the setting, the characters just simply state everything. For instance, when Mr. Hale is describing what happened when he arrived at the house the text only states that Minnie Foster moved from one chair to another, and not describing anything. Another example is, when they talk about the kitchen, nothing is described, the sheriff only says, “there is nothing in here but kitchen things.” (560) and then the men move on to somewhere else where they think they could possibly find evidence. However, in both the play and the short story the sheriff is said to touch one of the kitchen cabinets and his hand comes away sticky, which describes to the reader how dirty the kitchen is. The setting is a lot more detailed in the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” than in the play, because in the story, Glaspell takes a second to pause and describe to the reader what is being seen or displayed. When Mr. Hale is describing what happened when he got to the Foster house, in the short story, Susan Glaspell describes what the chair that Minnie Foster moved to looked like. Glaspell writes, “it was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side” (570). Also, in the short story, in the short story, when