Notes on the play "Trifles"

Karen Alkalay-Gut, in "Jury of Her Peers: The Importance of Trifles," also finds the gulf between male and female perceptions of judgment to be central to the play. Alkalay-Gut believes that the unfolding evidence not only unites the women, but highlights the division between "woman's concept of justice," which entails "social" and "individual influences, together with the details that shaped the specific act," and "[t]he prevailing law [which] is general, and therefore . . . inapplicable to the specific case" (8-9). As the "distance between the laws of the kitchen and the outside world increases," the women realize that the breach "negates the possibility of a 'fair trial' for Minnie Foster" (3, 8-9). Satisfied that Minnie's husband behaved so heinously that the "murder was totally understandable," they dispense justice by circumventing the law (6). According to Alkalay-Gut, the women are "clearly secure" about the correctness of their actions; their "secretive manner is one of superiority" (9).

An entirely different path is taken by Linda Ben-Zvi, who, in "'Murder, She Wrote': The Genesis of Susan Glaspell's Trifles," asserts that Trifles is less a comment on innate gender disparities than on assigned gender roles. Suggesting that "their common erasure" provides the impetus for women's actions, not "women's natures," she believes the question of guilt or innocence is irrelevant; what is on trial in the play is female "disenfranchisement" (158, 157). By focusing on the cruelties of Minnie's existence, her isolation, her "lack of options," and "the complete disregard of [her] plight by the courts and by society," Ben-Zvi feels that Glaspell "concretizes" the position of women in her society, moving the discussion beyond abstract problems of perception (157). The playwright's tactics force a recognition of "the central issues of female powerlessness . . . and the need for laws to address such issues" (157). The women's arrogation of authority serves as "an