The play Trifles depicts a profound disagreement between two types of attitude and performance. The play’s research exposes a significant contrast between female and male actions, based on a different perception of the environment. As Holstein claims in her paper, “the difference in initial perception ultimately leads to the creation of two competing ethical paradigms” (281). In this essay, the points of view of men and women will be examined to analyze varied understandings of the surrounding reality.
The play’s scene is a dark farm kitchen held by the lately choked John Wright and his wife Minnie, who is presently in prison for a murder committed. Three men are also seen in the play, and one is a nearby farmer who found the dead body; the second one is a community lawyer, and the third one is the local sheriff. Two women co-occur them: Mrs. Hale, the farmer’s wife, and Minnie’s old friend, and Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife. When men seek the room and the outbuilding to discover potential reasons for the death, women wander throughout the kitchen, restoring Minnie’s secret story. Using their attentiveness to the small things in her life, cuisine items that men acknowledge as insignificant are investigated by women. They try to explain events that could lead to murder, and since they understand the absent wife because they live a related life, they make a moralistic judgment to cover possibly compromising evidence.
The play displays a system of severe gender positions in which men are involved in the environment of work, and women are particularly at home. However, the division of male and female circles is not just a partition of work. Instead, Trifles describes a world controlled by men, in which civil expectations and boundaries substantially restrict women to their homes and correlate them with their spouses, with light control or their status (Mael 289). For instance, District Attorney George Henderson and Sheriff Henry Peters maintain Minnie Wright’s role as a housekeeper and are not modest about assessing her weaknesses in this area.
The central figures of the drama, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are named entirely by their husbands’ surnames. Minnie is the exclusive woman in the piece to obtain a name, although that name simply indicates how she changes in marriage, wasting her strength when she gets espoused and goes from Minnie Foster to Minnie Wright. Minnie’s condition is a crisis, she is wholly separated at the house and without kids, but her loneliness is merely distinct from other women. Both other women in the play can assume Minnie’s position because it is solely their reinforcement. While men interact through their profession in the world, women are abandoned at home on their own.
However, the domination of women exposed in the play progresses even further. A community controlled by men forces women to private living and leaves them subordinate to their partners. Those identical men likewise do not recognize their part in oppressing women. As a consequence, men humiliate women and get down their personality and intelligence. Gentlemen make fun of women for concentrating on trifles, minute requirements for family, and happiness, yet all these ideas empower men to oppress women. Men not plainly abuse women, but they further criticize women for appreciating the only things that their weakness will enable them to have.
At the opening of the performance, women also appear to admit that gender roles suppress them, like an actual society organization. Nevertheless, as the play proceeds, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters start to apprehend that, as women, they are enslaved. After seeing Minnie’s strangled bird (her husband killed it), they recognize their suppressed dreams, possibly even their repressed lives. In this ordinary observation, they discover a bond between themselves and other women and start to protest in their quiet manner and cover the evidence that can be useful for men.
Works Cited
Holstein, Suzy Clarkson. “Silent Justice in a Different Key: Glaspell’s ‘Trifles.’” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, 2003, pp. 281–84.
Mael, Phyllis. “Trifles: The Path to Sisterhood.” Salisbury State College, vol. 17, no. 4, 1989, pp. 282–91.