Susan Glaspell

Trifles

A Woman's Place:
Literary Background for Glaspell's Trifles
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of several prominent female literary figures, two of which
included Kate Chopin and Fanny Fern. Like many other women writers, Chopin and Fern wrote about the
inequality of the sexes and the inability of women to live their own lives without reliance on men; in this way,
they helped pave the way for female writers of the twentieth century. Glaspell, who struggled with similar
themes and concerns, inherited a rich legacy from these women. Indeed, when Susan Glaspell and her
husband George Cook arrived in Greenwich Village in the middle of an artistic revival and renaissance,
Glaspell began to write openly about these issues. In 1915, Cook, Glaspell and others started the
Provincetown Players, a venue for American plays that where too experimental and controversial for
Broadway. Female writers such as Chopin and Fern, and Glaspells involvement in the Provincetown Players,
strongly influenced the creation of Glaspells play Trifles.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of many female writers which dealt with issues similar
to those that would concern Glaspell. Judith Fetterley suggests that there exists "an extraordinarily rich,
diverse, and interesting body of prose literature written in the nineteenth century by American women"
(Introduction 1). The focus of most of this literature was on "women and their lives--or, in other words . . .
they chose to write about themselves" (Fetterley, Introduction 7). Glaspells Trifles is typical of this focus, for
the play takes place in a kitchen, the domestic sphere, and revolves around the lives of women.
Kate Chopin and Fanny Fern represent two writers who are a part of this rich history. In her works, Chopin
was concerned with exploring "relationships among . . . various classes and, especially, relationships between
men and women" (Skaggs 635). Chopins favorite theme was "the inherent conflict between the traditional
requirement that a wife form her life around her husbands and a womans need for discrete personhood . . ."
(Skaggs 635). This is seen in her short story "The Story of an Hour," where the main character, Mrs. Mallard,
first experiences a rebirth when she is told that her husband has died in a train accident but then suddenly dies
at the end of the story when Mr. Mallard walks in the front door. Like Chopin, Fanny Fern was first and
foremost concerned with revealing the hidden lives of women. Judith Fetterley suggests that Fern
demonstrated a "willingness to articulate that womens point of view conventionally ignored or suppressed . .
." ("Sara Willis Parton" 246). Ferns desire to explore womens issues that at the time were thought
unconventional marked her as forerunner in womens literature and a source of inspiration for other female
writers. Indeed, the works of Chopin and Fern helped pave the way for other female writers such as Glaspell.
In addition to the influence of the female writers who came before her, the venue of the Provincetown Players
served to mature Glaspell as a writer. The Players became a major artistic influence of the time, and also a
major influence in Glaspells life, giving her a forum and voice for her ideas and introducing her to new
people and new thoughts. Her husband, George Cook, also a member of the players, introduced her to new
ways of thinking: "she had met Cook and was pulled into the world of socialism, a concern with women's
suffrage, and a more realistic apprehension of the world around her--a new vision--which was expressed in
her second novel, The Visioning (1911)" (Bigsby 6). The Players also helped Glaspell mature; Bigsby
suggests that "in Susan Glaspell it [Provincetown Players] produced a writer much more accomplished than
her present dwindled reputation would suggest . . ." (20). Bigsby notes that Glaspell wrote eleven of the
ninety-three plays produced by the Players (20). The Provincetown Players greatly influenced Glaspell by
connecting her to new people and ideas, by maturing her as a writer, and by providing her an avenue for
expression.



Biographical Influences on Glaspell's Trifles
Susan Keating Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa, on July 1, 1876 (Noe 48). She graduated from Drake
University in Des Moines, Iowa, with a Ph. B. in Philosophy (Waterman 13). Her Midwestern background
would influence her writing throughout her career (30). After graduation from college Glaspell took a full-
time position as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News (Ben-Zvi 143). She based her first dramatic
play, Trifles, on an actual murder case she covered while working for the newspaper (143). Looking back she
would later say that her experiences at the paper provided her with enough material to quit her job and begin
writing fiction (144). While Glaspell had many of the experiences necessary for her writing career, her
eventual relationship with George Cook and the Provincetown Players ultimately allowed her the opportunity
to start this career.
Susan Glaspell was already a successful novelist when she met George Cram "Jig" Cook, a married man also
from Davenport (Makowsky 20). While her relationship with Cook allowed her an avenue for accessing
radical ideas, it also, paradoxically, embroiled her in traditional gender roles. A few years after meeting, they
began an affair, and, in 1913, they married (Waterman 13). Cook was a nonconformist who appealed to
Glaspell because he could "enact the rebellions" that her class and gender would not allow her to participate in
(Makowsky 20-21). By marrying Jig "she would no longer be the conventional, unmarried dutiful daughter of
Davenport" (22). Yet Cook was "a practioner of free love" who was difficult to live with because of his many
affairs (Makowsky 61). Indeed he also sometimes drank to excess (Noe 49). Makowsky suggests that Glaspell
would use her work as an outlet to vent the anger she felt toward Cook's behavior (61).
The married couple spent their summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and their winters in New York.
While in Provincetown, Glaspell, Cook and some fellow artists put on plays for their own amusement,
eventually naming themselves "The Provincetown Players" (Waterman 58-59). According to Waterman, the
main direction of the plays was established by Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, she being, besides O'Neill, the
one major talent produced by the Provincetown Players (59). At O'Neill's suggestion, "The Players" decided
to move to New York (59).
In New York, Glaspell and Cook resided in Greenwich Village, an established colony of artists and writers
(Bigsby 7). There, Glaspell experienced a major influence on her work. She was "living in a community
passionately concerned with socialism and feminism . . ." (Ben-Zvi 160) and was supported by a group of
friends who were intellectuals, socialists, feminists and radicals (Makowsky 24). Glaspell herself was a
founding member of Heterodoxy, a radical group of women activists who were prominent in the feminist
movement of New York in the years 1910-1920 (Ben-Zvi 160). It was within this atmosphere that Glaspell
would be encouraged to create female characters who desired to free themselves from the stereotypical roles
into which they had been cast (161).
According to Glaspell's recollection, during their stay in Greenwich, George Cook, needing material for "The
Players" first season in New York, demanded that Glaspell write a play (Makowsky 24). Searching for ideas,
Glaspell turned to her experiences as a reporter in Iowa, combined with her feminist philosophy and her life
with Cook. She credits his influence for challenging her to change her genre from fiction to drama, and to
"overthrow convention" in her form and content (24). The result is the play that she is best known for, Trifles.











Major Images Found in Glaspell's "Trifles"
Incompleted work: 1. These tasks are "signs of an incompetent housekeeper to the officers of the court; to
the women and to the audience these props help to establish the presence of a disturbed consciousness" (Noe
39). 2. "The incompleted tasks in Minnie's kitchen argue that she acted very soon after provocation, John's
strangling of the bird" (Smith 182).
Party Telephone: 1. "For John, the party-line telephone was more than an unnecessary expense; it was a
threat to the 'growing sense of exclusivity and possession' . . . . Minnie was his alone" (Smith 180). 2. This
image is significant here because of its relation to the question of justice which unfolds at the end of the play
where Mrs. Hale learns that the "greater crime . . . is to cut oneself off from understanding and
communicating with others, and in this context John Wright is the greater criminal and his wife the helpless
executioner" (Alkalay-Gut 7).
Wright: Glaspell intends a "Pun on the surname marking her [Mrs. Wright's] lack of 'rights,' and implying her
'right' to free herself against the societally sanctioned 'right' of her husband to control the family . . ." (Ben-Zvi
153-54).
A little closer together: "From their entrance, the women stand apart from the men, clustered at the stove.
The men talk with a rough familiarity born of working together and knowing one another. The women seem
less acquainted and never call each other by their first names. But at the men's first disparaging remarks about
Minnie's housekeeping and women 'worrying over trifles,' the women move closer together" (Smith 177).
Jar of Cherries: 1. "Minnie herself stayed on the shelf, alone and unbefriended on the farm, until the
coldness of her marriage, her life in general, broke her apart. Her secrets kept under pressure burst from their
fragile containers . . . The single intact jar symbolizes the one remaining secret, the motive to complete the
prosecutor's case" (Smith 175). 2. "'Preserves' explode from lack of heat, a punning reminder of the causal
relationship between isolation and violence" (Ben-Zvi 154).
Quilt: "To comprehend the story one may follow the technique of the housewives, who in making their
comprehensive patchwork quilt, sort and sift through trivia and discarded material, match small scraps
together, and then sew piece after piece into ever enlarging squares. The 'log cabin' patchwork the women
discover . . . is made exactly in this fashion: Rectangular scraps are sewn around the original square or
rectangle, followed by a series of longer scraps which are measured to the increasing size of the quilt. . . . the
general pattern is one that emerges with the quilt" (Alkalay-Gut 2).
Footsteps: The men enter and leave the room, "physically crisscross[ing] the stage as they verbally crisscross
the details of the crime, both actions leading nowhere, staged to show ineffectuality and incompetence"; in
this way, Glaspell undercuts their authority and questions their power (Ben-Zvi 155). .
Bird: 1. The bird was a "child-substitute for the solitary Minnie; the canary's voice was to displace the silence
of a coldly authoritarian husband and replace the sounds of the unborn children" (Makowsky 62). 2. "Through
the traditional literary metaphor of the bird's song as the voice of the soul, the women acknowledge that John
Wright not only killed Minnie's canary, but her very spirit" (Makowsky 62). 3. "Minnie understood her
husband's action as a symbolic strangling of herself, his wife. It is not just because he killed the bird, but
because Minnie herself was a caged bird . . . and he strangled her by preventing her from communicating with
others" (Alkalay-Gut 6).
Knot it: 1. This image "conveys the sense of knotting the rope around the husband's neck: they have
discovered the murderess. And they will 'knot' tell" (Alkalay-Gut 8). 2. "The bond among women is the
essential knot" (Smith 179).

Studies in Liminality:
A Review of Critical Commentary on Glaspell's Trifles

Dramatist Susan Glaspell wrote at a time when the boundaries between the private and public spheres were
beginning to break down. No longer relegated to the home, but not yet accepted in the marketplace, women
were caught in a position of liminality, pinned between the traditional female and male worlds by the
expectations of both. Glaspell's play Trifles falls among the many shades of gray in this interface of
perceptions, not only because of its context and content, but also because of the critical reaction to the play.
Although most criticism discerns gender conflict in the indeterminate area between law and justice in Trifles,
both the conflict and its consequences change form as each critic sees a different shape in the shadows.
Some critics find that gender differences create a dichotomy of perception in Glaspell's examination of law
and justice. In "Trifles: The Path to Sisterhood," Phyllis Mael argues that the evolution of the women's
relationships, from tenuous connection to collusion, illustrates the female ethos. Mael feels that the play's
"moral dilemma" highlights the innate differences between male adherence to theoretical principles of
morality and female empathic ethical sense which considers "moral problems as problems of responsibility in
relationship" (282-83). Although the women draw closer as the men, using "abstract rules and rights," make
comments that "trivialize the domestic sphere," ethical solidarity comes only after Mrs. Peters moves from
"acquiescence to patriarchal law" to empathy, thus effecting a change "from a typically male to a more
typically female mode of judgment" (283-84). This switch allows them to formulate a "redefinition of . . .
crime" which finds more culpability in their earlier failure to help Minnie than in their "moral choice" to
suppress evidence (284).
Karen Alkalay-Gut, in "Jury of Her Peers: The Importance of Trifles," also finds the gulf between male and
female perceptions of judgment to be central to the play. Alkalay-Gut believes that the unfolding evidence not
only unites the women, but highlights the division between "woman's concept of justice," which entails
"social" and "individual influences, together with the details that shaped the specific act," and "[t]he
prevailing law [which] is general, and therefore . . . inapplicable to the specific case" (8-9). As the "distance
between the laws of the kitchen and the outside world increases," the women realize that the breach "negates
the possibility of a 'fair trial' for Minnie Foster" (3, 8-9). Satisfied that Minnie's husband behaved so heinously
that the "murder was totally understandable," they dispense justice by circumventing the law (6). According
to Alkalay-Gut, the women are "clearly secure" about the correctness of their actions; their "secretive manner
is one of superiority" (9).
An entirely different path is taken by Linda Ben-Zvi, who, in "'Murder, She Wrote': The Genesis of Susan
Glaspell's Trifles," asserts that Trifles is less a comment on innate gender disparities than on assigned gender
roles. Suggesting that "their common erasure" provides the impetus for women's actions, not "women's
natures," she believes the question of guilt or innocence is irrelevant; what is on trial in the play is female
"disenfranchisement" (158, 157). By focusing on the cruelties of Minnie's existence, her isolation, her "lack of
options," and "the complete disregard of [her] plight by the courts and by society," Ben-Zvi feels that Glaspell
"concretizes" the position of women in her society, moving the discussion beyond abstract problems of
perception (157). The playwright's tactics force a recognition of "the central issues of female powerlessness . .
. and the need for laws to address such issues" (157). The women's arrogation of authority serves as "an
empowerment," as Ben-Zvi notes: "Not waiting to be given the vote or the right to serve on juries, Glaspell's
women have taken the right for themselves" (158). Thus, the female enactment of judicial power subverts
traditional concepts of law and justice.
Subversion is also the theme of Marsha Noe's "Reconfiguring the Subject/Recuperating Realism: Susan
Glaspell's Unseen Woman" which makes the ultimate statement on the indeterminate status of women in
Glaspell's world by focusing on Minnie's absence. According to Noe, the dramatic device of a protagonist
who is present only by insinuation "centers attention on woman and the ways in which the patriarchy
marginalizes her . . . " (38). The absent woman makes a mockery of male authority; not only does she "elude
the male gaze," and, consequently, his control, but she calls into question the androcentric judicial system
(38). Noe points out the need to trace the chain of cause-and-effect behind Minnie's action before assigning
guilt: "Alienated from her husband, powerless and silenced by . . . her marriage . . . Minnie is an unseen
woman long before she murders John Wright" (46). Unseen both "literally" and "metaphorically," Minnie
becomes a surrogate for all the invisible women in Glaspell's society (46).
Contrasting Noe's external focus, Veronica Makowsky, in Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women: A
Critical Interpretation of Her Work, sees the conflicts between law and justice in Trifles as a reflection of
Glaspell's internal discord. Makowsky writes that tensions between the playwright's love for her husband,
George Cook, and her resentment over his unfaithfulness found release in the "rebellions" of her characters,
whose "actions demand that the patriarchal world consider their feelings and situations as something more
than domestic 'trifles"' (61). However, while Glaspell recognizes the gender dichotomy and demonstrates an
empathy with it in her work, Makowsky believes that an ambivalence in her life leads her to treat the mutinies
as futile, if not negative, actions. While the "passive rebellion" of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters escapes
discipline, Minnie's "active insurrection," the murder of her husband, earns her private and public
chastisement (63). According to Makowsky, Minnie's actions afterward "indicate the ineffectual nature of her
act"; her voluntary removal "from the center of the kitchen" to the fringes of the room seems to be self-
punishment, an awareness of "her marginalized and outlaw status"; she realizes that "men still have
overwhelming power" (63-64). Minnie, who ends "imprisoned and possibly mad," reflects Glaspell's
uneasiness "with women who seek autonomy," women she "ultimately condemns . . . as selfish" (146). Law
triumphs over justice in Makowsky's dark vision of Glaspell's work.
Although the ambiguity of Trifles creates such differing critical perceptions, some common images emerge.
Most critical readings focus on female bonding as a means of gaining power; however, as Karen Alkalay-Gut
notes, "Underlying this attitude is the assumption that . . . women's lives are individually trivial, and their only
strength and/or success can come from banding together" (1). Such a premise defines women through
masculine precepts and confirms the male value system, authenticating the power of the public sphere by the
perceived need to replicate it. But, as evidenced in the ironically-named Trifles, where male disparagement
proved male undoing as the women used their assigned invisibility to subvert the law and effect justice,
women have a different kind of power. Women's power, subtle and indirect, is one of the liminal elements
in Trifles; originating in, but unconfined to, the private sphere, it radiates outward into the indeterminate area,
influencing both worlds. Bonding is both a manifestation of women's strength and its source; perhaps Glaspell
wished to show the women of her time that they had more power than they--or anyone else--realized.