Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” 2 pg. Response

Morgan Mullen
02/11/09
Period 11

Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” 2 pg. Response

This play shows women’s roles in the home during that time. It also shows the differences in the thinking between men ad women. The men believe that the woman killed her husband however; the women see a deeper side to the story. Glaspell uses the descriptions of the kitchen and also the actions of the characters.

The play starts by stating that there were unwashed dishes and how messy the house was but later when the two women were in the kitchen they noticed that most of the things where only half done. They could easily tell what the woman had been doing before she was discovered. They also understood her feelings about her broken preserves. Mrs. Hale can relate to the woman the most. She went knew how hard she worked to fix the preserves, how it felt for someone to come into your home and criticize it, and how it felt to get nervous and mess up a stitch while sewing. Most importantly Mrs. Hale knew her in the past and how she used to sing and be social. She knew how much the woman had changed and no longer sang or was social. She knew it was John Wright that had caused her to change. The women could also sympathize with the fact that in a home it is a woman’s job to clean and that is all. They knew she was lonely and didn’t find it surprising to find that she had a bird. The fact that it was a singing bird wasn’t surprising either until they found it had a broken neck and they knew who did it. These women knew how it was to be a woman in that time; to have no voice or opinion and to be stuck and helpless. They knew she was not guilty because of her small trifles during such important events.

The men however would never understand or even see the clues the woman left. When they over heard the ladies talking about the knitting they just laughed and didn’t notice that when Hale walked in she was knitting instead of pleating it. The knitting showed that she was nervous and the kitchen showed that she couldn’t stay still but tried to do the things she usually did. The men laughed at women’s trifles and would think she was guilty by what they saw and heard. The men wouldn’t know what it was like to get beat, or not to have a voice or opinion in everyday life. The two women didn’t even want to tell the men what they found knowing that what they said would just be thrown aside with a chuckle just like everything else.
In the end the messy kitchen showed that the woman was still trying to keep up her role as a housekeeper yet couldn’t complete a task due to nervousness. Her concern over her preserves and her need for her apron shows that she is just a house wife and doesn’t have anything other than trifles and her apron is the only thing that is a part of her personality. The cage and the bird symbolized the woman herself and how her voice and singing was silenced but also how she was still trapped. The actions of Mrs. Hale showed how most women have trifles and that the woman was not queer and mirrored almost every action the woman probably did before she was discovered.