Trifles by Susan Glaspell

First published: 1917

First produced: 1916, at the Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, Massachusetts

Type of plot: Mystery and detective

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: A family farmhouse in the American Midwest

Principal Characters:

• George Henderson, the county attorney, a young man investigating John Wright’s murder
• Mr. Peters, the middle-aged sheriff and local representative of the law
• Mrs. Peters, his middle-aged wife
• Mr. Hale, a middle-aged neighbor of the Wrights who discovers the crime
• Mrs. Hale, his wife

The Play

Trifles tells the story of two investigations into the murder of John Wright. The male characters carry on the official investigation while the female characters carry on their own unofficial investigation.

The play opens when its five characters enter the kitchen of the Wright farmhouse. The county attorney takes charge of the investigation, guiding the sheriff and Mr. Hale in recounting their roles in the discovery of the crime. Mr. Hale tells how he came to the house to ask John Wright about sharing the cost of a phone line, only to find Mrs. Wright sitting in a rocker. When he asks to speak with her husband, Mrs. Wright says that he cannot speak with Mr. Hale because he is dead. Mr. Hale investigates and finds that Wright has been hanged. After commenting on Mrs. Wright’s poor housekeeping in ways that irritate the women present, the county attorney leads the men upstairs so he can search the scene of the crime for a motive.

The women are left alone. While gathering some household goods to make Mrs. Wright feel more at ease in jail, they discuss Minnie Wright, her childhood as Minnie Foster, her life with John Wright, and the quilt that she was making when she was taken to jail. The men reenter briefly, then leave. The women discuss the state of the Wright household before Mr. Wright’s death. In the process, they communicate how greatly Mrs. Wright had changed over the years and how depressing her life with John Wright had been. The women express sympathy over what the kitchen disarray would mean emotionally to Mrs. Wright and how much of an intrusion it was for her to have all of these outsiders searching through her goods. The women discover Mrs. Wright’s pet bird. It has been killed, and Mrs. Wright had hidden it in her sewing box. The women’s eyes meet, but they do not speak directly about the bird. When she hears the men returning again, Mrs. Hale hides the dead bird.

Once the men have left again, the women discuss past pains and losses that parallel those that Mrs. Wright has suffered. A boy killed Mrs. Peters’s kitten when she was a child, and she was childless for a time, like Mrs. Wright. The women express a shared sense of responsibility for her isolation and suggest that they were criminally negligent to allow her to be entirely alone. Just before the men reenter, Mrs. Peters suggests that they are getting too upset over a dead bird.

The county attorney summarizes the case as he enters and indicates that the entire case is clear except for a missing motive. As the investigation ends, the sheriff asks the attorney if he needs to inspect the things the women are taking to Mrs. Wright in jail. The county attorney dismisses this jokingly, suggesting that there is no need because the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, is essentially married to the law. When the men leave the room to check one last detail, the women’s eyes meet again. Mrs. Peters tries to hide the box containing the dead bird in the bag of quilt pieces she is taking to Mrs. Wright, but it does not fit. Mrs. Hale hides the box in her coat pocket. When the men reenter, the women have one last chance to share this clue with them. They do not, and the play closes.

Dramatic Devices

In De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705), Aristotle’s treatise on drama, he argued that a tragedy should consist of a single action, completed in one place and taking no longer than one day. Trifles follows these rules perfectly, taking place in a single room and far less time than one day. However, Trifles is more a social criticism than tragedy. Glaspell uses a variety of dramatic devices to critique her society. There are no formal scene breaks in Trifles. Instead, the entrances and exits of the male characters define the play. Each time the men leave, the women exchange private information; each time they enter, the men force or prevent crucial decisions. This action controls the pace of the play and symbolizes how men run women’s lives, controlling and silencing them as John Wright silenced his wife.

The many doubles in Trifles create a symbolic structure. Mr. Hale is accompanied by his wife; the sheriff is accompanied by his wife, Mrs. Peters. The county attorney is there because another pairing, Mr. and Mrs. Wright, was disrupted, indicating that the law must step in when the symbolic foundations of society breaks down. To underscore this point, the county attorney looks for a way to speak for Mrs. Wright, who refuses to speak for herself, and who is, indeed, completely absent from the play, making her invisibility to the social order literal. The final doubling is between Mrs. Wright and her bird. The bird symbolizes Mrs. Wright, a beautiful creature who loved to sing. When her husband killed it, it was as if she had been killed, and she killed him in turn.

Glaspell adapts a technique from German expressionist drama, referring to the male characters primarily by their social roles. Yet, Glaspell gives this casting an ironic twist by giving the characters names that reveal who they really are. Mr. Hale is hale and hearty; Mr. Peters, whose name means “rock,” is a sheriff, or a foundation of society. These names fit far less well for the women. Minnie Foster was out of place as a foster child, and the man she marries, John Wright, is anything but Mr. Right. Irony runs through the dialogue as well. During the play’s climax, the women discuss how Mrs. Wright killed her husband, but the men assume the women are still discussing housework. This is the final example of the “trifles” that give the play its ironic title.

Critical Context

Susan Glaspell was part of a group of artists and thinkers devoted to a broad range of progressive causes, such as feminism, socialism, Darwinism, and legal reform. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the Provincetown Players, a theater group committed to transforming American theater from mere entertainment into an artistic medium in which serious social issues could be treated realistically. The group was crucial in establishing American drama. In addition to Glaspell’s work, the Players produced work by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill. Glaspell wrote several plays for the company, but Trifles is the best known and helped introduce the use of expressionist technique to the American stage.

Trifles is also important for its place in Glaspell’s individual career and for its place in American theater history. While writing for newspapers in her native Iowa, Susan Glaspell covered a murder trial in which a wife killed her husband. This trial became the basis not only of Trifles, but also of A Jury of Her Peers (1927), the story version of the play. Clearly, this story haunted Glaspell, and understanding this play is central to understanding Glaspell’s career as a dramatist. Her deep involvement in the play’s topic led her to play Mrs. Hale (her husband played Mr. Hale) in the original production.

Trifles demonstrated that the emerging popular genre of detective fiction could be used for higher artistic aims. Glaspell achieved this in part by the technical perfection of the play: Trifles is one of the classics of the one-act form. It is economically written, something not always true of Glaspell’s later work, even of Alison’s House (pr., pb. 1930), the play that earned for Glaspell the 1931 Pulitzer Prize. Trifles also introduces a technique that Glaspell reuses in other plays: The pivotal character never appears onstage. Trifles is the first major work of feminist theater written by an American playwright. It was well known when it was first performed, playing successfully throughout the United States and Europe, but was not performed as often during the middle of the twentieth century. Some critics argue that this absence indicates the way that women have traditionally been eclipsed on the American stage. However, with the emergence of a feminist consciousness late in the twentieth century, Trifles once again received the attention it so richly deserves.

Sources for Further Study

Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Glaspell, Susan. “Lifted Masks” and Other Works. Edited by Eric S. Rabkin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Ozieblo, Barbara. “Rebellion and Rejection: The Plays of Susan Glaspell.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1990.

Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights, 1900-1950. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. New York: Twayne, 1966.