Compare And Contrast The Fox And Trifles

Both The Fox and Trifles interrogate the issue of hierarchies, including the influence of gender, power struggles and the social order within nature. Feminism and repression of women, in particular, is a common theme throughout both of the texts due to the similar time they were written in, which is thought-provoking to note the parallels. All of the characters bring interesting issues to the texts that continuously reflect on social structures, as well as a clear voice by the author to exhibit the social issues at the time.

Within The Fox, the power dynamic on the farm is recurrently questioned due to the gender roles of Banford, March and Henry, and the main theme of a struggle for dominance between them. Interestingly, even without a male

Women were expected to fulfill a purely domestic role and act merely as the property of their husbands – for instance, the women are known by their married titles ‘Mrs. Peters’, ‘Mrs. Hale’, thus are given very little personal individuality to reflect their restricted status. The Sherriff dismisses looking through the kitchen as it was typically seen as a women’s workplace and unimportant to men: “Nothing here but kitchen things”. This is ironic as it is where the women find the clues that lead to finding a motive for Mrs. Wright’s crime, which immediately shows that although Glaspell is writing to undermine women, she is belittling the male’s intelligence rather than the women and criticising male’s place within society and their

Mrs. Peters initially defends her husband’s detective work and remains objective stating that “the law is the law”, but her growing compassion for the mistreatment of Mrs. Wright and the strength of Mrs. Hale against the men’s comments leads her to lie to her husband by withholding evidence. Russell’s interpretation of Mrs. Wright is that her growing sympathy gives “her new concept of law subjectively favours justice over procedure”. Taking justice into their own hands undermines the males in the play and their position as Court Attorney and Sherriff, thus on a wider scale, this undermines the hierarchy of having a judge and jury to decide on justice. The women give themselves significant status by lying to the men and this can be seen as, ironically, a small justice in a male-dominated world as law and the judicial system was significantly male controlled. Comparably, Mrs. Wright committing murder directly contests women’s position. According to Ben-Zvi, this evokes fear as it challenges the perception of a nurturing and passive woman; it is the ultimate rebellion against repression since her refusal to continue being submissive defies the established