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Who Is Susan Glaspell's Trifles?

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Introduction
In Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, a short play about rural life in the early twentieth century, a strong standpoint on feminism is presented to the audience. Throughout the play, much of the plot revolves around contrasting the men in power’s perception of a crime scene with the more subjective, emotional women’s point of view. It shows the discriminatory mentality men had towards women that were commonly accepted. The play also includes elements of what the women’s suffrage movement was all about and incorporates the mood of society during that time towards women; being that their social status was viewed beneath that of a male. During the play, the Attorney and Sheriff see a mess of preserves in the kitchen. Instead of investigating …show more content…

Here she lived in a community that had high ideals of socialism and feminism (Ben-Zvi). This influence encouraged her to create female characters who desired to free themselves from the stereotypical roles into which they had been cast (Ben-Zvi). Glaspell was one of the most influential playwrights to come from the Provincetown collaborative, and Trifles in particular has come to be known as a feminist work that deals with the psychology of crime through the lens of female domesticity (Biography of Susan Glaspell). With acting in the group, Glaspell wrote eleven plays for the Provincetown Players between 1915 and 1922. The Provincetown Players manifested to be extremely successful. Later, since Glaspell 's husband wanted to move away with new initiatives, they moved to Greece for the two years prior to his death in 1924. Glaspell then moved back to Massachusetts, where her writing continued. She collaborated with her second husband, Norman Matson in the play “The Comic Artist” in 1928. Six years later, she divorced Matson and in the same year as her divorce, she won the Pulitzer Prize for “Drama for Alison 's House,” a play based on Emily Dickinson 's biography. She also wrote a number of novels prior to her death in Provincetown due to a pulmonary embolism in

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