Trifles By Susan Glaspell Essay

Trifles, a play by Susan Glaspell, is about a group of men and their wives who go and try to solve the murder of a man. While the men go upstairs to investigate, the women stay downstairs to gather items for the suspected wife, however, they begin to uncover the truth about what really happened. Glaspell uses gender conflict, setting, and symbolism to portray the prejudices commonly associated with the time period and how it affected the women, including the wife, in the play. The main issue Glaspell hints at is the gender conflict between the men and the women. She uses the story of a wife who murdered her husband to demonstrate the roles of women in the early twentieth century. These roles were given to them by their husbands, in the play,

From beginning to end, the setting remains the same, taking place in one house, over the span of a few hours at most. The kitchen is the only room in the house where the play actually takes place, and the three men enter and exit periodically, discussing the murder and looking for evidence, while the women stay and look through all of the items to bring to Mrs. Wright in prison. The County Attorney comments on the dirty towel next to the sink, there is stale bread on the table, and in the cabinet’s, Mrs. Wrights preserves have burst. The men see the kitchen as a dirty place, which translates into thinking Mrs. Wright was a bad housekeeper, but in reality, she was most likely emotionally detached as a result of her husbands abuse. The time period the play is set in was one when women were generally viewed as inferior. Women did not have the right to vote yet, they were expected to act a certain way, where “respectability, then, included a set of ideas, normative values, and behavioral codes,” (Hickey) and men dominated all aspects of society, except for taking care of the children and the home. Just as at this period of time, the men in the play consider themselves superior, and leave them to their domain in the kitchen. Yet it is in the kitchen where the evidence of the motive for the murder is found, the one place the men never investigate, and it is the women who find the