Murder. Just the word itself gives someone the goosebumps, and it should. It occurs once every sixty seconds in the world. Trifles is no exception, the eeriness murder envelopes onto the reader is captured perfectly with Mr. Wright being hanged and his poor, innocent wife the main suspect. The murder itself is just the conflict, there is a bigger message to the play than solving who killed Mr. Wright? The status quo of women being helpless is broken by Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale; Glaspell breaks that status quo through ironic statements and the setting of the play. Trifles takes place in a time where women didn’t have much power or respect in their communities. When the men just assume that Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are only at the …show more content…
Trifles is probably set in the middle of January somewhere in the Midwest, where the high is ten degrees and the wind chill is beyond freezing, with a light snow blowing across the roads and the visibility limited. Not one person in this world would say freezing cold is meant to be happy, it is creepy and eerie; and that is exactly what coldness should be, something that is impossible to be rid of unless someone covers themselves up. Cold is not just something that is used to describe the air around it also is used to describe a person. When the murder took place in Trifles, “it had dropped below zero last night. . . “ (ln 8) it’s connotation could be it was cold outside. But it’s denotation could be Mrs. Wright’s heart had turned cold. The reader’s later find out that her husband was not a very nice man and the farmhouse wouldn’t “be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it” (lns 121-122). The cold temperatures alludes the viewer/reader to the breaking of the status quo that even though it is thought that men are the ones who are cold-hearted, under the right intentions women too can have cold hearts that can only be melted by love and Mrs. Wright didn’t get any love from her husband to melt her cold