Sherlock Holmes, one of the greatest detectives known to literacy, always uses nearly trivial information to help him solve tricky cases. Comparably, Sherlock's coveted talent for detecting the essential components is actually a natural trait of females. The use of irony and symbolism in Trifles by Susan Glaspell, exposes how men belittle women and their knack for finding out intricate facts in the 19th century despite how useful a woman's unique ability to pick out minuscule yet critical details is to investigative work.
A woman’s role during the early 19th century is defined by being ‘seen and not heard’, a classical and highly demeaning approach that Susan Glaspell uses comically and ironically in her play, Trifles. By Glaspell’s two women playing to stereotypes, they discover the mystery behind the murder before their men can even form a hypothesis. While the men note the bigger and more blatant details such as their general dirty surroundings “[Court Attorney] No—It’s not very cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct,” (Glaspell qtd. in Jago et al. 105), they take no time to stop and consider the reasoning behind Mrs. Wright’s unkempt house in a Gestalt fashion. Instead Glaspell’s intuitive women do what the status quo allows them to: they snoop and gossip to find out the larger story. Glaspell even has Mrs. Hale mockingly says “I don’t know there’s anything so strange, our …show more content…
Hale and Mrs. Peters, Glaspell’s two investigative women understand that when Mrs. Wright’s husband murdered her canary, a symbol for her free spirit, Mrs. Wright is unable to overcome her depressing predicament as her husband’s doll and chooses to retaliate by disposing of him. Ultimately, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters fight for Mrs. Wright in an additionally ironic manner because they say nothing of what they have discovered, which in turn protects Mrs. Wright who they realize now is simply a victim to her own societal helplessness as a