Susan Glaspell wrote two different forms of literature that have basically the same plot, setting and characters. This was during a period in which the legal system was unsympathetic to the social and domestic situation of the married woman. She first wrote the drama version “Trifles” in 1916 and then the prose fiction “A Jury of Her Peers” in 1917. The main difference was the way the prose fiction version was presented. Glaspell effects emotional change in the story with descriptive passages, settings and the title. The prose fiction version has a greater degree of emotional penetration than the drama version.
Although the dialogues have basically been unchanged from the dramatic version to the prose fiction version, Glaspell has passed her message more effectively in the narrative. While Glaspell uses the characters or actors to vocalize the emotions of the story from the play “Trifles”, she makes the reader feel the emotions in “A Jury of Her Peers” by including descriptive passages to accompany the dialogue in her narration. The opening paragraph of the story was a description of Mrs. Hale’s unkempt kitchen “… which will later serve as a point of comparison with the major scene of the story, Mrs. Wright’s kitchen” (Mustazza). This opening description helps readers foreshadow why Mrs. Hale could easily identify with Mrs. Wright. “Through her brief opening description of the landscape Glaspell establishes the physical context for the loneliness and isolation, an isolation Minnie inherited from and shared with generations of pioneer and farm women before her” (Hedges). The description of the road to Mr. Wright’s farm also helps reveal to readers Mrs. Wright’s “geographical isolation” (Hedges). Glaspell provides the short story v...
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Mustazza, Leonard. "Generic Translation and Thematic Shift in Susan Glaspell's 'Trifles' and 'A Jury of Her Peers'." Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (Fall 1989): 489-496. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jenny Cromie. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 29 Mar. 2011.
Orit, Kamir. “To Kill a Songbird: A Community of Women, Feminist Jurisprudence, Conscientious Objection and Revolution in A Jury of Her Peers and Contemporary Film” Law and Literature Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2007) (pp. 357-376). Print.
Wright, Janet Stobbs. "Law, Justice, and Female Revenge in 'Kerfol,' by Edith Wharton, and Trifles and 'A Jury of Her Peers,' by Susan Glaspell." Atlantis 24.1 (June 2002): 299-302. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 132. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 29 Mar. 2011.
Born in 1867, Susan Glaspell was raised in rural Davenport, Iowa during a time where young ladies were expected to marry and raise a family. Glaspell never conformed to this expectation; instead graduating from Duke University, becoming a reporter for Des Moines Daily News, and becoming a successful author and playwright. During her years as a reporter, she covered the story of Margaret Hossock, a farm wife in Iowa accused of murdering her husband. This would later serve as her inspiration for Trifles. Glaspell was a woman who bucked societal expectations but was not blind to the plight other women faced. (Ozieblo) Trifles shows how silencing a person’s soul can be just as dangerous as taking the song out of a caged canary; stealing
Glaspell, Susan. "A Jury of Her Peers." Literature and Its Writers. 6th ed. Boston, New York:
One of the most important tools that an author uses to convey his message to the reader throughout the text is his language. It plays a vital role in setting the overall tone of the text and helps in foreshadowing with crumbs of symbols and imagery. This essay focuses on the play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, first performed on August 8th, 1916.
Glaspell spent more than forty years working as a journalist, fiction writer, playwright and promoter of various artistic. She is a woman who lived in a male dominated society. She is the author of a short story titled A Jury of Her Peers. She was inspired to write this story when she investigated in the homicide of John Hossack, a prosperous county warren who had been killed in his sleep(1).Such experience in Glaspell’s life stimulated inspiration. The fact that she was the first reporter on scene, explains that she must have found everything still in place, that makes an incredible impression. She feels what Margaret (who is Minnie Wright in the story) had gone through, that is, she has sympathy for her. What will she say about Margaret? Will she portray Margaret as the criminal or the woman who’s life has been taken away? In the short story Minnie Wright was the victim. Based on evidence at the crime scene, it is clear that Minnie has killed her husband; however, the women have several reasons for finding her “not guilty” of the murder of John Wright.
“In the battle of the sexes, woman gains her greatest victory by surrendering,” is an anonymous quote that can be related into any point in history and, unfortunately, even in modern day life. In society men have always been considered superior to women, but Susan Glaspell challenges sexism in society through the female leads in “Trifles” through structure, setting, and symbolism.
Susan Glaspell tells the story of a murder in a small town in the midwest. The man who was murdered was Mr. Wright, and everyone believes the guilty party may be his wife, Mrs. Wright, but two other women in the story decide to conduct an investigation of their own to try to solve this murder. In a scholarly essay about this story, Judith Kay Russell tells how the three women in the story are like the three fates from Greek mythology. Each woman plays a specific role in the tragic fate of Mr. Wright, and Russell goes into detail about each woman to emphasize that they are only powerful together.
Susan Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist, and actress. She married in 1903 to a novelist, poet, and playwright George Cram Cook. In 1915 with other actors, writers, and artists they founded Provincetown Players a group that had six seasons in New York City between 1916-1923. She is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography. She was a pioneering feminist writer and America’s first import and modern female playwright. She wrote the one act play “Trifles” for the Provincetown Players was later adapted into the short shorty “A Jury of Her Peers” in 1917. A comparison in Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” and “A Jury of Her Peers” changes the titles, unfinished worked, and
...mpletely dependent upon men. Playwright Susan Glaspell cleverly causes the reader to question the way that women and men are viewed in society. The women in Trifles, though they were overlooked by the men, solved this case while the men failed to do so when they were supposedly in charge. In failing to recognize the women’s ability to contribute to their work the men succeed in causing the women to unite, giving them the real power and knowledge to solve this mystery. All the while the women are moving a little closer together and moving forward toward their rights.
Grose, Janet L. “Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’: Feminine Reading and
The short story “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell was first published in 1917. Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story version of her one-act play Trifles. Glaspell claimed that “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles are based on her experience as a court reporter. When she was in Iowa, she covered a story on the murder of a sixty-year-old farmer, John Hossack. John Hossack’s wife, Margaret, had claimed that she had been asleep when her husband was killed. She was then tried for his murder. Critics agree that “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell is her greatest story, which demonstrated the roles of women of her time.
I. Article Summary: Suzy Clarkson Holstein's article, “Silent Justice in a Different Key: Glaspell's 'Trifles'” evaluates the play Trifles and how the difference between the men in the play mirror how a woman's perspective is very different from a man's. Trifles is about two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, who show up at a house with their husbands and the county attorney to investigate a murder. The entire time the men are looking for evidence to implicate the accused wife, Minnie Wright, of killing her husband. Meanwhile, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are there to gather up some items to bring Minnie Wright in jail. While doing so, the women uncover evidence that would prove the wife is culpable but decide to hide it from the men in the last moments of the play. Trifles is evaluated on how the women are able to come up with the evidence unlike the men because they didn't approach it like a crime scene but rather a home, “By contrast, the women arrive at a home. Although neither they or the men realize it, they too are conducting an investigation” (Holstein 283). Holstein also notes they are able to find evidence because they use their own life experiences to relate to the accused murderer, Minnie Wright as shown here; “But the women do not simply remember and sympathize with Minnie. They identify with her, quite literally” (285). Holstein finishes the article by noting the women decide to hide the evidence because of the solidarity they feel towards Minnie Wright; “From Mrs. Hale's perspective, people are linked together through fragile, sometimes imperceptible strands. The tiny trifles of life –a neighbor's visit, a bird's song, the sewing of a quilt –have profound reverberations” (287).
The central theme in “A Jury of Her Peers” is the place of women in society and especially the isolation this results in. We see this through the character, Minnie Foster and her isolation from love, happiness, companionship and from society as a whole. Not only does the story describe this isolation but it allows the reader to feel the impact of this isolation and recognize the tragedy of the situation.
“There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.”(Chopin 2). This line comes from the short story “The Story of an Hour” written by Kate Chopin in 1894 tells the story of a woman reacting to the death of her husband while at the same time the story makes broader statement about women’s rights at the time. Similarly, the story “A Jury of Her Peers”,written by Susan Glaspell, is written like a detective story. It is about solving a murder case but just like “The Story of an Hour”, there are underlying themes of feminism and commonly
In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles Mr. Wright’s murder is never solved because the two women in the story unite against of the arrogance of men to hide evidence that would prove Mrs. Wright as the murderer. The play Trifles is about the death of farmer Mr. Wright and how the town sheriff and attorney try to find evidence that his wife Mrs. Wright killed him. As the play progresses the men’s wives who had come along were discovering important pieces of evidence that prove the men’s theory but chose to hide from them to illustrate the point that their ideas should have been valued and not something to be trifled. The very irony of the play comes from its title trifles and is defined as something that isn’t very important or has no relevance to the situation that it is presented to. In this play the irony of the title comes from the fact that the men find the women’s opinions on the case trifling even though the women solve the crime which ends up being the downfall of the men as they would have been able to prosecute Mrs. Wright if they had listened which made the women’s opinions not trifling. Glaspell was born in an age where women were still considered the property of men and they had no real value in society in the eyes of men except for procreation and motherhood. This attitude towards women was what inspired Glaspell to write the play Trifles and to illustrate the point that women’s attitudes should be just as valued as men’s and to let women have a sense of fulfillment in life and break the shackles that were holding them only as obedient housewives. Trifles was also inspired by a real murder trial that Glaspell had been covering when she was a reporter in the year 1900. Glaspell is a major symbol of the feminist movement of l...
" Studies in Short Fiction 33.2 (Spring 1996): 171-184. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano.