Trifles by Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell was a novelist and playwright as long as the “first wave” of the feminist movement. Although the motion was at the start afraid with Suffrage, afterwards surf handed out with “inequality of justice, as well as social inequalities”. In her one-act play, “Trifles”, Glaspell cultivated the germs of the recent feminist motion with views to in the household hostility (Smith, 1982:178).

In rank to better appreciate the author's intent and the disagreement she was attempting to make with this narrative we can view at it from the psychological critical perspective. This will give us an appreciating of the motives and behaviours of the writer and her well-written characters.

Susan Keating Glaspell (1882-1948), as cofounder of an influential theatrical financial gathering, had a many outlet to investigate and endorse notorious socialist and feminist issues. Residing in Greenwich Village, she was encased by activists, and was herself a start component of a thorough feminist group. When Glaspell wedded George Cook, she was ironically shove into conventional gender roles. Cook was often hard to inhabit with because of his extreme imbibing and several affairs. It is probable that Glaspell projected her displeasure over her father into her characters. Combined with this surroundings, the precise thought for “Trifles” came from a actual slaughter tryout that she was ascribed to cover as a broadsheet reporter in Iowa.

Susan Glaspell's one-act play, Trifles, is supported on real events that happened in Iowa at the turn of the century. From 1899-1901 Glaspell worked as a reporter for the Des Moines News, where she included the slaughter tryout of a farmer's wife, Margaret Hossack, in Indianola, Iowa. Hossack was defendant of putting to death her father, John, by punching him double in the head with an axe while he slept.

Initially it was supposed that burglars had slaughtered the rancher, but a subsequent sheriff's examination turned up established items putting forward Mrs. Hossack was miserable in her marriage. Ultimately, she was accused with and encountered culpable of the law-breaking and condemned to life in prison.

Over the course of sixteen months, Glaspell drafted twenty-six portions covering the case, from the statement of the slaughter until Hossack's conviction. The writer encountered herself feeling more and more compassion for the defendant, in spite of the grisly natural world of the crime.

Years afterwards, Glaspell and her father, George Cook, along with some acquaintances, founded the Provincetown Players, an amateur theatrical financial gathering on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1916 the gathering submitted a summertime succession of shows that embraced Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff. In need of a new play to end the time of the year, Cook put forward Glaspell should draft a one-act for the company. Her recollection of the Hossack tryout encouraged Trifles.

Trifles is a slaughter enigma that investigates gender bonds, power between the sexes, and the natural world of truth. In the play, the rancher and his wife not ever truly appear; alternatively, the narrative focuses on the prosecutor, George Henderson, who has been called in to examine ...