“Trifles” by Susan Glaspell

Introduction

Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, was in writing in 1916, and reflects the author's preoccupation with culture-bound notions of gender and sex roles. As the name of the play by Susan Glaspell, "Trifles" proposes, the anxieties of women are often advised to be meagre trifles, insignificant matters that accept little or no significance to the factual work of humanity, which, of course, is being conveyed out by men. As Holstein contends in her term paper, although, the interrogating Glaspell provokes is not inevitably only about women's functions in humanity, but rather how information and viewpoint are treasured or devalued inside exact contexts.

 

Analysis

Holstein argues that the two aligned narratives of Trifles are constructed upon “the dissimilarities in [men's and women's insights and behaviors as they are] grounded in the dwelling space” (282). According to Holstein, the men in the play set about the Wright dwelling, where Mr. Wright has been discovered killed, as a misdeed view, while the women who escort them throughout the enquiry set about the dwelling as a home. Holstein accepts that the men and the women have two very distinct causes for being there—the men, to fulfill their obligations as regulation professionals, the women, to arrange some individual consequences to convey to the imprisoned Mrs. Wright. Yet she contends that in Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" the detail that the alterability of their motives is rigid, in the case of the men, and flexible, on the part of the women, works out how they outlook the scene. There are two critical penalties of this positioning on the part of the women. First, Holstein states that the women's “way of understanding directs them not easily to knowledge; it furthermore directs to the conclusion about how to proceed on that knowledge” (282). She recounts this way of ...