MLA Research Paper

Introduction

Susan Glaspell's one-act play, Trifles, is founded on genuine happenings that appeared in Iowa at the turn of the century. From 1899-1901 Glaspell worked as a reporter for the Des Moines News, where she enclosed the killing test of a farmer's wife, Margaret Hossack, in Indianola, Iowa. Hossack was suspect of murdering her married man, John, by hitting him two times in the head with an ax while he slept.

 

Thematic investigation of Susan Glaspell's "trifles" 

Initially it was presumed that burglars had killed the grower, but a later sheriff's enquiry turned up clues proposing Mrs. Hossack was sad in her marriage. Ultimately, she was ascribed with and discovered at fault of the misdeed and punished to life in prison. Over the course of sixteen months, Glaspell composed twenty-six items covering the case, from the broadcast of the killing until Hossack's conviction. The scribe discovered herself feeling more and more understanding for the suspect, in spite of the grisly environment of the crime.

Years subsequent, Glaspell and her married man, George Cook, along with some associates, based the Provincetown Players, an amateur theatrical business on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1916 the assembly offered a summertime sequence of performances that encompassed Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff. In require of a new play to end the time of the year, Cook proposed Glaspell should compose a one-act for the company. Her recollection of the Hossack test motivated Trifles.

Trifles is a killing secret that discovers gender connections, power between the sexes, and the environment of truth. In the play, the grower and his wife not ever really appear; rather than, the article focuses on the prosecutor, George Henderson, who has been called in to enquire the murder; Henry Peters, the localized sheriff; Lewis Hale, a neighboring grower who found out Wright's body; and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, wives to the two localized men. While the men bluster and tramp round the farmhouse seeking for signs, the women find out morsels of clues in the ''trifles'' of a farmer's wife—her ovenbaking, cleansing and sewing. Because the men effectively disregard the women's world, they stay unseeing to the reality before their eyes.

The setting for Trifles, a bleak, messy kitchen in an left behind country farmhouse, rapidly sets up the claustrophobic feeling of the play. While a freezing winter breeze assaults out-of-doors, the individual characteristics document in one at a time to enquire a brutal murder: the farm's proprietor, John Wright, was evidently strangled to death while he dozed, and his wife, Minnie, has been taken into custody as a suppose in the crime.

The sheriff, Henry Peters, is the first to go in the farmhouse, pursued by George Henderson, the advocate prosecuting the case. Lewis Hale, a close by, is besides enter. The men cluster round a oven to get moderately hot while they arrange for their investigation.

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale pursue the men into the kitchen; yet, they hesitate just interior the door. They are conspicuously rather distracted by what has occurred in ...