When people go out to see a play performance, while most times they are going for the sake of being entertained, in my opinion the most effective dramas are the ones that they can take a piece of with them when they leave. To do this, the drama needs to not only have a hook to peak interest and keep the audiences attention, but it needs to appeal to the audience on some basic but deep human level. The audience needs to start identifying with the characters, to start caring about them, because once the audience starts feeling for certain characters, they can often start forming their own opinion about the drama. This opinion is not so much just a “How was the performance?” type of question, but rather a more introspective questioning of how one would act or feel within the context of the same sort of situation presented in the drama. “Trifles”, by Susan Glaspell, is one such drama that tries to appeal to the audience for an opinion on a sort of ethical dilemma.
We are introduced to the story at the Wright house. The characters are still strangers to us, but they are ordinary and, although one is the sheriff, generally not intimidating people, a handful of men and women trying to figure out what happened. However, the story builds the plot and characters together in a few different ways. We see the difference in attitude concerning the situation’s assessment by the men and the women, the development of a “case” for Mrs. Wright in killing her husband, and the heart conflicts of the women who happen to find possible evidence of motive.
In dealing with figuring out this case, the men and women react differently. While they are all on the side of justice and doing what is right, the men are very objective and task-oriented about the investigation, which is generally the correct way to do it. They want to get to the point and do their search of the crime scene, and consider any smaller points later. Some of what is said but put off to be considered later actually imply some foreshadowing of the real issue surrounding Wright’s death. A bit of this can be seen in part of the exchange between Mr. Hale and the county attorney, when Hale mentions that “…I said to Harry that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John.-“, and the attorney cuts him off saying “Let’s talk about that later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but tell now just what happened when you got to the house.”(Arp, 1034) This information, on the other hand, has more meaning later on in the story. While the men are going about business and being objective, the women, however, are looking over what Mrs. Wright left behind and subjectively trying to understand what happened and even more so why Mrs. Wright would do such a thing. This drama suggests looking deeper into the evidence in order to truly understand, and this involves an appreciation of the “little things” and the significance that they can carry, or rather the “trifles”, as this story is aptly titled. I consider the key exchange to emphasize this theme is one of passing comments between the attorney and the sheriff:
COUNTY ATTORNEY (looking around). I guess we’ll go upstairs first – and then out to the barn and around there. (To the SHERIFF) You’re convinced that there was nothing important here – nothing that would point to any motive?
SHERIFF. Nothing here but kitchen things. (1035-1036, emphasis mine)
Regardless of that statement, the women, left to their devices, basically crack the case and motive on their own, simply looking closer at these kitchen things.
The case that is developed for Mrs. Wright can be seen through both the women’s findings and their description of her former personality and situation. The women keep referring to Mrs. Wright, in their youth, as having been a lively girl who sang in the choir and was “real sweet and pretty.” (1041) As they go through her things, the suspense is built through the bits and pieces that they find to be out of the ordinary. Some messy stitching on a quilt, an empty bird cage, the dead pet bird – and someone has wrung its neck. Slowly a possible motive presents itself for those who care enough to be paying close attention.
Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters start to build their conclusions from all of this while the men are still busy somewhere else in the house. They consider the Mrs. Wright they used to know, that is, before she married John Wright, who, according to some of the women’s comments, must have drained all the joy out of her life. After finding the killed pet bird, they begin to identify in various ways with the kind of pain Mrs. Wright must be experiencing. What’s interesting to note here is the fact that they mention a few times that Mrs. Wright used to love singing in her younger days, and that it makes sense that, without having any children running around that lonely house, she would have appreciated at least having a bird to sing to her. There is a bit of symbolism that can be drawn from this – Mrs. Wright used to sing, the bird used to sing, John Wright “kills” the music in his wife, and later on he kills her bird also, because, according to Mrs. Hale, “…Wright wouldn’t like the bird – a thing that sang..” We are painted a picture of pretty tragic emotional living conditions for Mrs. Wright. At this point in the drama, connections can be made to this sort of feeling, identification with having experienced having something wrongfully taken away from us. While reading the script, I myself started feeling sympathy for Mrs. Wright’s loneliness and frustration, despite the fact that she has supposedly murdered her husband in his sleep. Emotional appeal is an incredibly powerful thing. The women experience a hesitation about whether to hide this evidence of a motive and help out a fellow wife, or whether to go with the law and look at everything from the single standpoint of her having killed her husband. In the end they choose the former option, and hide the evidence. The audience is left to decide for themselves whether or not this action is justified, and consider what they themselves would do in such a situation.
Works Cited
Glaspell, Susan. “Trifles.” Perrine‘s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 9th. 2006.
