Female Relationships in Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Cherrie Moraga's Giving Up the Ghost
The plays Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, and Giving Up the Ghost, by Cherrie Moraga, focus on women's interaction in various contexts. Despite the seventy-eight years between their performance dates and the drastic difference in settings and narrative content, the main female characters are comparable, as Mrs. Hale, in Trifles, points out, "We all go through the same things -- it's just a different kind of the same thing" (Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 1359). These plays show the varying degrees of closeness women can have in female relationships, and the role circumstances play.
When Trifles opens, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters do not know each other, and Mrs. Peters does not know Mrs. Wright; initially establishing the women's familiarity is important as they are essentially strangers. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are immediately grouped together by the men in the play, who subtly consider them and their concerns insignificant; Mr. Hale notes, "Women are used to worrying over trifles" (Glaspell 1353). The irony of the women finding what the men can not, Mrs. Wright's motive, emphasizes their importance in the play; the men failing to recognize this also creates dramatic irony. Mrs. Hale having known Mrs. Wright before she was married and having not visited her in over a year is significant as she illustrates Mrs. Wright's transition from a social to an isolated woman as a result of her marriage to John Wright. As she has children, Mrs. Hale can understand the importance of Mrs. Wright's canary, which served as the role of her child; similarly, Mrs. Peters can relate to Mrs. Wright, whose only company in her quiet, empty house was ...
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...en. Probably the most striking commonality is how women relate through those by which they are haunted: just as Marisa recalls her cousin Norma who was committed to a mental hospital, Alejandro's death seriously impacts Amalia; Mrs. Peters recalls her dead baby in an effort to relate to Mrs. Wright, and Mrs. Hale remembers the woman Mrs. Wright was before her marriage. Both Glaspell and Moraga explore the universal theme of isolation and how relationships can create, in the case of Mrs. Wright, or diminish it, as with Marisa and Amalia.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Teresa Sullivan. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton, 1985.
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton, 1985.
Moraga, Cherrie. Giving Up the Ghost. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton, 1985.
Davidson, Cathy N. and Linda Wagner-Martin. The Oxford Companion to Womenâs Writing In The United States. New York: Oxford United Press, 1995.
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Delany, Sheila. Writing Women: Women Writers and Women in Literature: Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken, 1983.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Gilbert, Susan, and Sandra Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1979.
Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, was written in 1916, reflects the author’s concern with stereotypical concepts of gender and sex roles of that time period. As the title of the play implies, the concerns of women are often considered to be nothing more than unimportant issues that have little or no value to the true work of society, which is being performed by men. The men who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable to solve the mystery through their supposed superior knowledge. Instead, two women are able decipher evidence that the men overlook because all of the clues are entrenched in household items that are familiar mainly to women during this era. Glaspell expertly uses gender characterization, setting, a great deal of symbolism and both dramatic and verbal irony, to expose social divisions created by strict gender roles, specifically, that women were limited to the household and that their contributions went disregarded and underappreciated.
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Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, xi-xxiv. Print.
Fisher, Jerilyn, and Ellen S. Silber. Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003. Print.
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Susan Glaspell's play, "Trifles", attempts to define one of the main behavioral differences between man and woman. For most of the story, the two genders are not only geographically separated, but also separated in thought processes and motive, so that the reader might readily make comparisons between the two genders. Glaspell not only verbally acknowledges this behavioral difference in the play, but also demonstrates it through the characters' actions and the turns of the plot. The timid and overlooked women who appear in the beginning of the play eventually become the delicate detectives who, discounted by the men, discover all of the clues that display a female to be the disillusioned murderer of her (not so dearly) departed husband. Meanwhile, the men in the play not only arrogantly overlook the "trifling" clues that the women find that point to the murderer, but also underestimate the murderer herself. "These were trifles to the men but in reality they told the story and only the women could see that (Erin Williams)". The women seem to be the insightful unsung heroes while the men remain outwardly in charge, but sadly ignorant.
Most of the actions take place in the kitchen setting which demonstrates the author’s deliberate move to show the important details about the wifely role. The women hold their conversation in the unkempt kitchen, a domestic sphere that reveals everything about the lives of women. While the men were busy searching for clues around the farmhouse, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale see some evidence in the trifle that Mrs. Wright had left in the kitchen. The women can deduce that the messy kitchen with dirty pans gives a signal of incomplete work. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter spend most of their time in the messy kitchen that significantly reveal Mrs. Wright’s state of confusion (Manuel 61). Mrs. Hale understands Mrs. Wright’s experiences of loneliness and desperation from the male-dominated circumstances. The female characters sympathize with her situation by acknowledging the forces in her life that made her take the roles including that of murdering her husband. The men overlook the evidence that the women can trace in the house, and their dialogue suggests lack of sympathy towards women as noted from their humiliation and sarcasm towards women. For example, the women can relate the death of the canary to the murder scene. The attorney shows how woman’s concerns are unimportant, instead of sympathizing with Mrs. Wright for what has befallen her, they portray their women
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