Susan Glaspell's Trifles

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Annotate Bibliography for a Sociological and Psychological Approach to Trifles
Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, based on the John Hossack murder trial, claims that the social roles of women were limited, creating an imbalance of power between both genders. Thus, in cases of crime, the male dominant, judicial system was biased against powerless women.
Alkalay-Gut, Karen. "Jury of Her Peers: The Importance of Trifles." Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 21, no. 1, Winter84, p. 1. EBSCOhost, lscsproxy.lonestar.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cpid&custid=s1088435&db=a9h&AN=8648431&site=ehost-live
In this document, Karen Alkalay-Gut takes a unique approach to Trifles and presents social pressure as a villain that …show more content…

She emphasizes that women do not have a voice in society or at home. The John Hossack murder case is a trial by a male dominant, judicial system because women’s opinions are not considered. Then, Ben-Ziv expertly points out that in Trifles, Glaspell gives women a voice through Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale and exposes the societal limitations placed on the female gender. Moreover, the audience receives a glimpse of the home life of a female and the arduousness associated with it. This source contains necessary information such as gender roles and societal norms, which I need to lay the foundation of my research project. I recommend this source to anyone researching feminism as it targets those who are interested in the themes of gender roles and feminism found in Trifles.
Bryan, Patricia L., and Thomas Wolf. Midnight Assassin: A Murder in Americas Heartland: A True Account. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, …show more content…

Hale and Mrs. Peters from a state of awareness to a state of action. The author asserts that the legal system is male dominant, which indirectly enables male brutality against women and societal dismissal of women. As the prime investigators of the crime, the sheriff, country attorney, and the farmer do not understand the circumstances of Mannie, but Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale do. Moreover, both female characters realize that the judicial system has been organized and set against their gender. Kamir points out that to assist and allow one of their own to be convicted under the biased system would have been a form of deep submission and self-annihilation. Therefore, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale unite with Mannie to fight the hostile legal system with their passive, yet different voices. No individual can win against a system, but a community of individuals can certainly alter the system. This source is an excellent depiction of the impact that the judicial system has had on the female gender. It targets a wide range of audiences who are inquisitive about the themes of law and history found in Trifles. I will use this source in my paper because it explains the judicial forces against women. I recommend this to researchers who are interested in law, women history and the judicial

Power In Trifles
2135 Words | 5 Pages
The power of women is different than that of men. Women display a subtle and indirect kind of power, but can be resilient enough to impact the outside world. In Trifles, Susan Glaspell delivers the idea that gender and authority are chauvinistic issues that confirm male characters as the power holders, while the female characters are less significant and often weak. This insignificance and weakness indicated in the play by the fact that the women had the evidence to solve a murder, but the men just ignored the women as if they had no value to the case at all. This weakness and inability of the female to contest the man’s view are apparent. According to Ben-Zvi, “Women who kill evoke fear because they challenge societal constructs of femininity-passivity, restraint, and nurture; thus the rush to isolate and label the female offender, to cauterize the act” (141). This play presents women against men, Ms. Wright against her husband, the two women against their spouses and the other men. The male characters are logical, arrogant, and stupid while the women are sympathetic, loyal, and drawn to empathize with Mrs. Wright and forgive her crime. The play questions the extent to which one should maintain loyalty to others. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale try to withhold incriminating evidence against Mrs. Wright, and by challenging the reader to question whether
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Susan Glaspell's Trifles
1167 Words | 3 Pages
Susan Glaspell's Trifles explores the classical male stereotype of women by declaring that women frequently worry about matters of little, or no importance. This stereotype makes the assumption that only males are concerned with important issues, issues that females would never discuss or confront. The characters spend the entirety of the play searching for clues to solve a murder case. Ironically, the female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, uncover crucial evidence and solve the murder case, not the male characters. The men in the play, the Sheriff, County Attorney, and Hale, search the scene of the crime for evidence on their own, and mock the women's discussions. The women's interest in the quilt, broken bird cage door, and dead canary, all of which are assumed to be unimportant or trifling objects, is what consequentially leads to their solving of the crime. The women are able to discover who the killer is by paying attention to detail, and prove that the items which the men consider insignificant are important after all.
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Blurred Boundaries in Susan Glaspell's Trifles
491 Words | 1 Pages
In her landmark feminist play, "Trifles," Susan Glaspell offers a peek at the complicated political and social systems that both silenced and divided women during their struggle for equality with men. In this simple but highly symbolic tale, a farmer's wife, Minnie Wright, is accused of strangling her husband to death. The county attorney, the sheriff, a local farmer, the sheriff's wife and the farmer's wife visit Minnie's farm house. As the men "look for clues," the women survey Minnie's domestic environment. While the men scoff at the women's interest in what they call "trifles," the women discover Minnie's strangled bird to realize that Minnie's husband had killed the bird and Minnie had, in turn, killed him. They bond in acknowledgment that women "all go through the same things--it's all just different kind of the same thing" (1076). As their horror builds and the women unravel the murder, they agree to cooperate with one another, conspiring to protect Minnie against the men by hiding the incriminating "evidence."
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To Kill a Canay: A Contrast and Comparison of Trifles to a Jury of Her Peers
897 Words | 2 Pages
To Kill A Canary: A Contrast and Comparison of Trifles To a Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell:
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Repression of Women Exposed in Susan Glaspell's Trifles
954 Words | 2 Pages
Susan Glaspell in Trifles explores the repression of women. Since the beginning of time, women have been looked down upon by men. They have been considered “dumb” and even a form of property. Being physically and emotionally abused by men, women in the early 1900’s struggled to break the mold formed by society.
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Thesis For Trifles By Susan Glaspell
467 Words | 1 Pages
“Trifles” written by Susan Glaspell explores the oppressive nature of an enduring patriarchal hierarchy within farm life throughout the 1900’s coinciding with the extensive psychological damage solitude and isolation imposed on the soul of, Mrs. Wright.
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Feminist in Susan Glaspell´s Play Trifles
987 Words | 2 Pages
In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles a man has been murdered by his wife, but the men of the town who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable solve the murder mystery through logic and standard criminal procedures. Instead, two women (Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters) who visit the home are able to read a series of clues that the men cannot see because all of the clues are embedded in domestic items that are specific to women. The play at first it seems to be about mystery, but it abruptly grows into a feminist perspective. The play Trifles written by Susan Glaspell can be considered a revolutionary writing in it its advocacy of the feminist movement.
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Trifling Justice
1534 Words | 4 Pages
...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.
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Justice In Susan Glaspell's Trifles
972 Words | 2 Pages
In the play Trifles, Susan Glaspell brings together three women through a crime investigation in the late nineteenth century. Glaspell uses symbolism, contrast of sexes, and well-constructed characters to show that justice for all equally important to finding the truth.
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The Deception of Trifles: Gender Roles in the Play by Glaspell
1559 Words | 4 Pages
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
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Trifles By Susan Glaspell Analysis
1217 Words | 3 Pages
In today’s society, many women are powerful, independent, and for the most part treated equal to men, but before the 1920's women were restrained by the men. Imagine what being a woman in this era would be like. In Susan Glaspell’s play “Trifles,” she addresses the life of women in the 1900’s by examining the marital relationships among the characters, specifically between Mrs. Wright and Mr. Wright, the Sheriff and Mrs. Peters, and last Mr. Hale and Mrs. Hale. Glaspell accomplishes this by separating the husbands and wives into different rooms in the home of the Wrights, leaving the women all together in the living room and kitchen, which is where they find the crime scene evidence. The point being is that the men did not consider what the
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Literary Analysis Of Setting In Susan Glaspell's Trifles
1284 Words | 3 Pages
Trifles is based on a murder in 1916 that Susan Glaspell covered while she was a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News after she graduated from college. At the end of the nineteenth century, the world of literature saw a large increase of female writers. Judith Fetterley believed that there was an extremely diverse and intriguing body of prose literature used during the nineteenth century by American women. The main idea of this type of literature was women and their lives. The reason all of the literature written by women at this time seems so depressing is due to the fact that they had a tendency to incorporate ideas from their own lives into their works. Glaspell's Trifles lives up to this form of literature, especially since it is based on an actual murder she covered. This play is another look at the murder trial through a woman's point of view.
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Analysis of the Play Trifles
1307 Words | 3 Pages
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...
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The Treatment of Women in Trifles by Susan Glaspell
844 Words | 2 Pages
"Trifles," a one-act play written by Susan Glaspell, is a cleverly written story about a murder and more importantly, it effectively describes the treatment of women during the early 1900s. In the opening scene, we learn a great deal of information about the people of the play and of their opinions. We know that there are five main characters, three men and two women. The weather outside is frighteningly cold, and yet the men enter the warm farmhouse first. The women stand together away from the men, which immediately puts the men against the women. Mrs. Hale?s and Mrs. Peters?s treatment from the men in the play is reflective of the beliefs of that time. These women, aware of the powerless slot that has been made for them, manage to use their power in a way that gives them an edge. This power enables them to succeed in protecting Minnie, the accused. "Trifles" not only tells a story, it shows the demeaning view the men have for the women, the women?s reaction to man?s prejudice, and the women?s defiance of their powerless position.
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Trifles Title Analysis
1511 Words | 4 Pages
However, they got the last chance to prove that their role is not trifles as presumed by the oppressive society. The effort of the two women to control their fate is evident when they decide to stay loyal to their sexes as a sign of rebellion towards their men who have been controlling their fate. Glaspell succeeds in discussing poignant issues of gender discrimination and oppression. Thus, the choice of the title “Trifles” is appropriate for this drama because the issues highlighted throughout the drama are the unimportant roles played by women in everyday life. The women that are trivialized and dismissed by the male-dominated society win over male prejudice, which disregards the dominant beliefs of gender
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Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Power In Trifles