Trifles By Susan Glaspell Essay

In Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, the plot focuses on a single moral choice. That choice is doing the wrong thing for the right reason. “The play addresses the abiding issue of justice and contemporary issues of gender and identity politics.” (Moe). Throughout the play, Glaspell interweaves these issues until they are impossible to separate. In the first part of the play, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters enter the now abandoned house of John Wright, Mrs. Wright’s husband (Glaspell 330). They are there as wives, adjunct to their husbands’ roles in society. However, through the process of attempting to help another woman gather items from her household that might comfort her in jail, they learn to identify themselves first as women and only secondarily as wives. Each woman recognizes their own lives in Mrs. Wright’s suffering, and each comes to see that given
these wrong circumstances, she, too, would have killed the man that damaged her. These women symbolize all women, and this growing awareness suggests the possibility of personal transformation that decades later emerged in feminist consciousness-raising groups. When they hid the evidence of Mrs. Wright murdering her husband, the two women are condoning the crime, or declaring that it wasn’t a crime to begin with. This stance creates a tremendous moral dilemma.
The ideal of justice is that a truly just society is impartial. All the male characters are blind to what is going on and are even condescending to the women (Moe). The county attorney is the worst example of this in the play. He is so certain that he knows what the situation entails, that he will not let other characters finish speaking. Yet, he, and all the male characters cannot see the truth that is literally right in front of their faces. Mr. Hale and the sheriff cannot see that the women they all live with are keeping something from them. This suggests that the entire concept of the justice system during the time period of the play is flawed (Moe). Either there are different justices for different groups, according to their experience of the world, or worse, there are different reliabilities, invisible to those who do not share them. The choice to hide a dead bird, for example, may symbolize the death knell for the western political system (Moe) . At the very least, the play can put doubts on all legal structures unless the perspective of the female is used
(Moe). Trifles can demonstrate that the emerging popular genre of detective fiction could be used for higher artistic aims. Glaspell achieved this in part by the perfection of the play. Trifles is one of the classics of the one act form. It is economically written, something not always true of her later work (Moe).