Effect Of Duty, Law, And Justice In Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Susan Glaspell's Trifles is a play about the effect of gender differences on perceptions of duty, law, and justice. When a character named John Wright was murdered, the Sheriff and County Attorney go to investigate his house, as it was believed his wife murdered him. As the two investigate, the Sheriff brought his wife Mrs. Peters and the neighbor of the Wrights that reported the event, Lewis Hale, brought his wife Mrs. Hale also to the house. While the women stayed in the house, they started to talk about Mr. Wright’s murder, which the story mainly focuses on their conversation. They talk about why Mrs. Wright would murder her husband, the treatment Mr. Wright gave to his wife, and the justice which was being served to Mrs. Wright and the
justice she would never get in their society. Although the men are continuously thinking that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, they can’t find evidence to explain the motives behind Mrs. Wright, which was the mistreatment of her as a woman. However, the men would never think this was the motive because they felt they were doing nothing wrong to their wives, so the motives would never be revealed.
The title Trifles is significant because it explains the mistreatment of woman in one word when Mr. Hale said “Well, women are used to worrying about trifles” (Trifles, 187) This meaning that women are used to worrying over nothing or something of little value just because they are women, showing that men thought women were inferior to them because they never thought of anything of little value and that they were always important, unlike the women.