Motivation for Murder in Susan Glaspell's Play Trifles
In her brief play Trifles (1916) author Susan Glaspell seems at first to use the aftermath of a woman's having murdered her husband as her main action. However, by the conclusion of this play, it becomes clear that this event, and the way the other characters react to it, is of mere secondary importance. Glaspell uses the setting of the investigation of the murder of Mr. John Wright, by his emotionally abused wife while he slept, to demonstrate deeper underlying concerns. The most important of these is the trivialization, especially by male characters within the play (e.g., Hale; the Sheriff; the County Attorney, and by implication, John Wright) of the women's lives, feelings, perceptions, and rights. In this essay, I will explore ways that Glaspell uses character, language, and setting to develop her theme of women's desperate aloneness in circumstances like Mrs. Wright's, and how Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, similarly subjugated by men, understand Mrs. Wright's rationale for murder, although the male characters do not.
As the play opens, Mr. Wright has been murdered yesterday (as we learn, hanged by the neck with a rope while sleeping in his bed). His wife, Mrs. Wright, is believed to have killed him. Today, Mrs....
Trifles Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles is frequently anthologized, and for good reason (Makowsky 59; Cerf 103). The play differs from a traditional drama in a number of ways, including its structure and narrative content, but arguably its most important feature is it reveals who its protagonists are and the effect this character choice has on the play as a whole. Although the actions of Minnie Wright constitute the narrative focus
While men ignore the kitchen as containing "nothing but kitchen things," women look for evidence precisely there because it is the only place where women are in control. As Holstein (2003) argues, women do not enter the house of Mr. Wright as a place of investigation but as a home of two human beings who have feelings. For men, what matters is the evidence and if they find one,
El Dorado by Edgar Allan Poe Susan Glaspell worked as a legislative reporter for Des Moines Daily News between 1899 and 1901, during which time she witnessed and covered the trial of Margaret Hossack, accused of attacking and murdering her husband. Glaspell kept files that recorded the entire investigation throughout several months and wrote Trifles 15 years later. The play has only one act and there are five characters altogether,
play Trifles? Analyze and support the theme by giving examples from the story Susan Glaspell's play Trifles is intended to illustrate women's superior 'ways of knowing,' and the callousness of males towards women. It asserts the importance, even the superiority of the feminine perspective. Author Susan Glaspell is called one of the "first feminists" of American theater, and Trifles was groundbreaking when it was first produced in 1921. Her "works
Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen, and "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell. Specifically, it will compare and contrast Torvald and his attitude toward Nora in the play, to the men's attitudes toward women in the play "Trifles." Both these pieces show women treated simply as idiotic "things" by the men in the pieces, but the women are clearly smarter than the men are, and it is the men who end up
Trifles" and "Fences" While both "Fences" by August Wilson and "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell depict the stresses and strains upon a group of people who are marginalized by mainstream society, the dramas deploy different narrative techniques to do so. "Trifles" describes the difficulties women face in male-dominated society on stage, while "Fences" makes its African-American characters the center of the dialogue and staging, and white influence occurs in the margins,
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