Susan Glaspell Research Paper

Christian Camargo
Susan Glaspell: A Woman Committed to Every Woman

In the process of women’s emancipation as autonomous entities in a male-dominated society, literature, as the powerful mean of conversion that it is, has been one of their most strong weapons to successfully launch their critical, social comments against the oppression of their male counterparts. Female writing emerges out of this struggle to be acknowledged today as a separate category of scholarly interest. Among many important female authors in English Literature, Susan Glaspell “is now widely recognized”, and studied “as one of the most influential” (Black).
Glaspell was born July 1, 1876, in Davenport, Iowa, although other sources cite her birth year as 1882. She was a fertile novelist and productive short story writer with thirteen plays, fourteen novels, and more than fifty essays, articles, and short stories to her credit. Nevertheless, it is as a playwright that she made her most substantial and best known works. In fact, in 1931 she became only the second woman playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House (Gale).
Previous to Alison’s house, the play Trifles is Glaspell
's most anthologized work and accounts for much of her popularity as a twentieth-century American playwright.
The play is based on real life events. In December, 1900, farmer John Hossack from Warren County in Iowa was murdered with an axe as he slept. His 57-year old wife, Margaret, was charged with the killing. Susan Glaspell covered the trial for her newspaper writing over the course of sixteen months twenty-six articles covering the case, from the announcement of the murder until Hossack’s conviction. The jury did not believe Mrs. Hossack story that she slept through the killing, while she lay next to her husband as he was murdered. She was found guilty (Simkin).
While covering the trial Glaspell “approached the case like a detective; she personally investigated the murder, visiting the Hossack farmhouse, interviewing the attorneys, and studying the inquest testimony... The case made an indelible impression on Glaspell" (Bryan) who developed a deep compassion for the accused, in spite of the shocking nature of the crime. Due to the keen sense of analysis proved by Glaspell during her career it must be certain she found enough evidence while covering the story to sustenance her sympathy for Margaret Hossack. Although she does not assert the accused’s innocence, she does suggest in Trifles that something must have happened to her that led her to commit the crime, if in fact she committed it at all.
Glaspell’s play Trifles must be understood as more than a feminist on stage drama; it is in essence a trial. The play is opened by the County attorney George Henderson who from the beginning takes the role of a condescending Prosecutor. His witnesses are Lewis Hale, the neighbor farmer that discovered Wright’s body, and the Sheriff Peters. The suspect is Mrs. Minnie Foster Wright, a woman who is tacitly accused of killing her Husband John Wright, who’s been strangled while he was sleeping next to her. According to Mrs. Wright she does not know who committed the crime, even though she was on the bed when it happened. To complete the proper elements of a real trial there is a defense, played by two women: Mrs. Hale, the neighbor, also married to Lewis Hale, and Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife. The great appeal of the play is that it places the audience as the juror body, who in the end will be the one to decide in their minds whether or not Minnie Foster should be declare guilty or innocent.

The similarities between the play and the Hossack’s case are outstanding: both couples were farmers, both men were killed while sleeping, both women were by their side when the crime happened and both deny any awareness of it. Although Margaret Hossack was found guilty, seems that for Glaspell there was much more to it that was not revealed in her trial. In her play, she implies the belief that Margaret Hossack was a woman defending herself from the abuse of a bully husband. In the 1900th society was patriarchal and women were not listened to. They had very few rights, and they were supposed to be subjugated to their male counterparts. Their role in society was still as submissive housewives; the concept of an abusive husband did not existed. Susan Glaspell suggests in her play Trifles that she found enough evidence to propose mitigating facts in Mrs. Hossack’s defense, details that were underestimated by a rigid masculine society. In Trifles, Glasspell speaks not only for the misrepresented Margaret Hossack but also for the women of her time. Through the characters of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter, Glaspell herself seems to play the role of a more observant, a better qualified defense attorney defending the suspect Mrs. Minnie Foster. Their argument resembles the modern Battered Wife Syndrome Defense, which is defined as “a defense used in court representing that the person accused of an assault / murder was suffering from battered person syndrome at the material time” (Rothenberg 780). Because the defense is most commonly used by women, it is usually characterized in court as battered woman syndrome or battered wife syndrome. Though “there is currently no medical classification to support the existence of this syndrome in the sense used by lawyers […] it has historically been invoked in court systems” (Rothenberg 780).
Although the medical condition is not gender specific, the law has been persuaded to remedy perceived gender bias in the operation of the defense of self-defence by admitting evidence of the medical condition.
The courts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States have accepted the extensive and growing body of research showing that battered partners can use force to defend themselves and sometimes kill their abusers because of the abusive and sometimes life-threatening situation in which they find themselves, acting in the firm belief that there is no other way than to kill for self-preservation. The courts have recognized that this evidence may support a variety of defenses to a charge of murder or to mitigate the sentence if convicted of lesser offenses. Rothenberg 781.
In 1994, as part of the Violence against Women Act, the United States Congress ordered an investigation into the role of battered woman syndrome expert testimony in the courts to determine its validity and usefulness. In 1997, they published the report of their investigation, titled The Validity and Use of Evidence Concerning Battering and Its Effects in Criminal Trials. “The federal report ultimately rejected all terminology related to the battered woman syndrome…noting that these terms were ‘no longer useful or appropriate’” (Rothenberg 782). Instead of using the term "battered woman", the terminology “battering and its effects” became acceptable. The decision to change this terminology was based on a changing body of research indicating there is more than one pattern to battering and a more inclusive definition was necessary to more accurately represent the realities of domestic violence (Rothenberg 783).

Susan Glaspell certainly recognized these patterns in the case of Mrs Margaret Hossack, almost 81 years before writing such federal report was even taken into consideration; however, there was little that she could do in behalf of Mrs. Hossack. One can conclude that she responded by writing Trifles to what she thought was a biased and ultimately unfair prosecution.
In the play, one can follow a subtle line of thoughts that resembles the defense of an attorney with deep knowledge of the “battering syndrome”. It almost sounds like Susan Glaspell herself is talking to her audience, using her female characters as surrogates, just like a lawyer would address a body of jury, pointing details that support such defense. In that sense is the voice of Glaspell that speaks through the lips of Mrs Hale and Mrs Peters. Actually, it is Mrs Peter’s first statement in the play “I am not Cold” (Kennedy 838) when invited by George Henderson to “come up to the fire” a bold feminist statement against male patronizing but also a direct accusation against the lack of sensitivity, “the coldness” of heart and mindset of the Country Attorney, who is the one that needs to be closer to the fire to get warmed up (perhaps close enough to get burned as opposed to Mrs Minni Foster).
The next bold statement comes from Mrs Hale when she says “Men 's hands aren 't always as clean as they might be”. Although subtle, such is another accusation. It seems she is referring to the ordinary dirt in a farmers hands; nevertheless that’d would be too obvious to even been mentioned, of course it is natural that a farmer has muddy hands!. The real purpose of her assertion is to make a denunciation of physical abuse from men to women, specifically from the decease Mr Wright against his wife, and that is how Glaspell opens the defense of Minnie Foster: The dirt in her husband hands comes not from the duties of a farmer, instead they come from the violence against Minnie herself. Later on, Mrs Hale finishes her opening profiling John Wright as an irascible man, she continues saying “I don 't think a place 'd be any cheerfuller for John Wright 's being in it.”( Kennedy 841) implying he was the opposite to cheerful; that would be dark and burdensome, which one may think would be the words that a women from that particular time would use to define a violent man.
Perhaps one of the most emotional arguments into Susan Glaspell’s defense of Minnie ,or her real life’s reflection Mrs Margaret Hossack, is the before and after description that she makes of her: “She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was thirty years ago. This all you was to take?”(Kennedy 841). Something sad happened to Minnie during those thirty years, something that took the best of her. It must have been something so bad that diminished her and made her pass from the “town girl singing in the choir” she used to be into the tragic woman rockin ' back and forth in a rocking chair, in a dazed state, as she is described by Lewis Hale when he finds John Wright’s body.
During the play the women find an empty birdcage with a broken hinge. Immediately after that they discover, treasured in a sewing box, a dead bird, with the neck "wrung." They tacitly assume that Mr. Wright killed the one thing that gave his wife pleasure and that this was her motivation for breaking his neck with a rope as he slept. When the men, who have been searching the house and grounds, return to the kitchen, they condescend to the women and lament their own failure to find a motive with which to convince a jury of Minnie Wright 's guilt. Then the women in an action of female camaraderie conceal the dead bird from their husbands and from the county attorney. They become accomplices of Minnie because they were capable to understand the subtext of the trifles their husbands disregarded, perhaps saving Minnie from conviction (Bryer).

The author makes a sharped social remark by portraying the men in this play with a sense of arrogance that ultimately is what makes them unable to see what is presented as obvious to their female counterparts.
Her eloquence in Trifles, and certainly during her career, lies in her ability to make implicit statements in non-verbal assertions: "Just as the women create their instinctive theories out of trifles, so the playwright builds her play out of small gestures (a broken hinge on a birdcage which reflects the broken neck of the bird, the broken neck of the man, but also the broken spirit of the woman, who had bought the cage). The man imprisons the woman, the woman imprisons the bird. And yet they are all imprisoned in a system equally implacable.… It is a play which works by understatement" (Bigsby
25).
Glaspell was an author committed to the woman of her time. Her narrative includes every woman, from the victimized to the feminist figher. In fact, all her female characters represent the ideal of one woman who is fighting for the recognition of a long played role in society, a role sometimes played against her will. She gave an early voice to the struggles of this collective woman for that recognition and denounced the violence, sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant against her, but most important, she made out of this woman a silent heroin instead of a tolerant victim.

Works Cited

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama: Volume One—1900– 1940. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Bryan, Patricia L., and Thomas Wolf. Midnight Assassin: a Murder in America 's Heartland. IA City, IA: University of Iowa, 2007. Print.

"Susan Glaspell." LitFinder Contemporary Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2007. LitFinder. Web. 13 Sep. 2011.
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print.

Rothenberg, Bess. “’We Don’t Have Time for Social Change’ Cultural Compromise and the Battered Woman Syndrome.” Gender and Society Oct. 2003:771-87.

Simkin, John. "Susan Glaspell : Biography." Spartacus Educational. Web. 24 Aug. 2011.