Trifles

Trifles is a one-act play by Susan Glaspell. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on August 8, 1916. In the original performance, Glaspell played the role of Mrs. Hale. The play is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks.

The play begins as the men, followed by the women, enter the Wright's empty farm house. On command from the county attorney, Mr. Hale recounts his visit to the house the previous day, when he found Mrs. Wright behaving strangely and her husband upstairs with a rope around his neck, dead. Mr. Hale notes that when he questioned her, Mrs. Wright claimed that she was asleep when someone strangled her husband. While the county attorney, Mr. Hale, and Mr. Peters are searching the house for evidence, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters find clues in the kitchen and hallway to this unsolved mystery. The men find no clues upstairs in the Wright house that would prove Mrs. Wright guilty, but the women find a dead canary that cracks the case wide open. The wives realize Mr. Wright killed the bird, and that led to Mrs. Wright killing her husband. The wives piece together that Minnie was being abused by her husband, and they understand how it feels to be oppressed by men. Because they feel bad for Minnie, they hide the evidence against her and she is not punished for killing her husband.

The play is loosely based on the murder of John Hossack, which Glaspell reported on while working as a news journalist for the Des Moines Daily News. Hossack's wife, Margaret, was accused of killing her husband. However, Margaret argued that an intruder had killed John with an axe. She was convicted but it was overturned on appeal.

"...years later ... the haunting image of Margaret Hossack's kitchen came rushing back to Glaspell. In a span of ten days, Glaspell composed a one-act play, Trifles ... A year later, Glaspell reworked the material into a short story titled "A Jury of Her Peers."

Trifles premiered at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1916.

Trifles is seen as an example of early feminist drama. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, are able to sympathize with Minnie, the victim's wife, and understand her possible motive, which leads them to the evidence against her. The men, meanwhile, are blinded by their cold, emotionless investigation of material facts. The female characters find the body of a canary, with its neck wrung, killed in the same way as John Wright, thus leading them to the conclusion that Minnie was the murderer. Clearly, the wife is represented by the caged bird, a common symbol of women's roles in society. The plot concludes with the two women hiding the evidence against Minnie.

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Wikipedia