Gender Roles In The Play Trifles

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Susan Glaspell’s Trifles is a play about the effects of gender differences on perceptions of duty, law, and justice. In Trifles women are perceived as not intelligent and dependent on men. The play “Trifles” is about a man that has been murdered by his wife, the men in charge of investigating the crime are unable to solve the murder mystery through the crime scene. Instead, two women who come with the men where the crime took place, unintentionally, solve the crime by reading a series of clues the men cannot seem to put together, because of the domestic item around the house. The women can put the clues together because of specific places of running a house. The significance of the title of the story “Trifles” is used because men dismiss the women concerns as trifling and that is why Susan Glaspell named her to play “Trifles”. She also wanted to show the differences of duty, law, and justice between men and women. The historical look at gender differences during the setting of “Trifles” is in the early nineteenth century. In this time period men gave these roles to be thought that all women had to do is concern themselves with unimportant things and worry about just home, children and husband. It is believed that a women or
219) when Mrs. Peters lets them know about the jars out of fruits preserves, he “lets the women know that their worrying about the fruit preserves has no common sense and has any importance” after he says this you start noticing that the women start piecing the crime together, When the county attorney says “Not much of a housekeeper, would you say ladies?” (pg. 217). The country attorney Henderson assumes the women are solely responsible for the house and any dirtiness is because Mrs. Wright did not know how to keep to her duty in house cleaning. To the men in “trifles,” it is viewed that women should do her duty and not worry about anything that does not concern

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