English · Chapter 25
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"Trifles" is a one act play by the American writer Susan Glaspell (1876 to 1948), written in 1916 for the Provincetown Players. Glaspell had worked as a newspaper reporter and had covered a murder trial in which a farmer's wife was accused of killing her husband, and that trial lies behind the play. She later retold the story as "A Jury of Her Peers". The play is set in the kitchen of a lonely farmhouse where a man has been strangled in his bed. Two women, there on a domestic errand while the men search for a motive, read the small details of the room and understand what the investigation misses.
Mrs Hale, the neighbouring farmer's wife, is the more outspoken of the two women. She knew the accused as the girl Minnie Foster, and she resents the men's contempt for the housekeeping of a woman who had no help. Her strongest feeling is guilt, because she stayed away from that lonely house for years. She leads the reconstruction of the crime.
Mrs Peters, the sheriff's wife, is quieter and at first inclined to say that the law must be followed. She notices the uneven stitching and the broken door of the bird cage, and her change of mind is the moral centre of the play. Memories of a childhood cruelty and of the stillness of her house after her first baby died bring her to understand a woman she has never met.
Minnie Wright, the accused, and John Wright, the dead man, never appear. She is present only in what the kitchen shows and in what the women remember, a girl who sang in the choir before thirty years of marriage in a cold house silenced her. He was a hard, joyless husband, honest in his dealings and bleak to live with.
The County Attorney, the Sheriff and Mr Hale conduct the official search. They are not unkind, but they are certain that nothing of importance can be found in a kitchen. Mr Hale is the neighbour who found the body.