Compare And Contrast Lamb To The Slaughter And Trifles

Trifles are things of little value or importance. In the play Trifles and in the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” women are viewed as the trifles in someone’s life, most often to a man or to the husband of the woman and are often seen as a nuisance and have little value. Also, they are most often talked down to or viewed as below everyone else. Because of this they are viewed as too stupid to be able to think about anything besides cooking and cleaning, that they are often overlooked, allowing them, in both stories, to get away with lying and deceiving others. Throughout Trifles and “Lamb to the Slaughter” all of the male characters view their female counterparts as incompetent and unintelligent, but based on their actions throughout they …show more content…
So because their views are most shown, readers will be lead to believe what the male characters say. In the “Overview of “Lamb to the Slaughter”, an analysis of the story, Piedmont-Martin, believes that readers are pushed to view women in the same way, so when they actually see what the female characters are like in the story, they are often surprised by their intelligence and their strength that they hold. She states, “Because on the first reading we are predisposed to think of her as the “lamb,” the innocent who is about to get hurt, we do not notice how her composure that evening seems put on, or at least strained” (Piedmont-Martin 2). Women in stories are often viewed as the weak and unintelligent character and their potential is often overlooked. Piedmont-Martin thinks that readers will often underestimate the women just as the men in the story did to Mary. The reader feels as though she would never be capable of committing a murder just as the men in the story never thought that she could be the culprit. Because the dominant, or male characters feel that women are the “lamb”, the reader will go along with the characters of authority and will believe what the men say without questioning it. That and the reader does not view Mary as acting strange because of the fact that the men, or the police in the story are oblivious to her …show more content…
The lying and misleading that they did throughout the play to the men that came to the house, caused the attorney to not be able to figure out what the motive was for the murder. So because they had more intellect than what was first believed of them, they were able to trick the men into believing all that they said and to keep Minnie from getting charged with the murder of her husband. The attorney and the other male characters in Trifles need to realize that the women are not as much of a trifle as they seem to