Female Interaction In Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Female Interaction in Trifles When and over what do females bond? In Susan Glaspell’s frequently anthologized play Trifles, women are able to identify with each other in situations that have strong domestic undertones. Written in 1916, Trifles expertly implies the hardships that women bonded over in married suburban life. As Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters go around Minnie Wright’s kitchen, they unravel both her hobbies and hardships and are able to empathize with her wrongdoings. The play can be seen as a social and political standpoint against rural gender roles. The play often features the women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, standing close together frequently in the stage directions. It’s clear that the men examining the house are intimidating, and together the women feel a little more powerful against them. The main clear instances of the two women bonding occur when the men are downplaying Minnie Wright’s care of the house. Hale’s statement, “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles” (728M), causes the women to move closer together, which sums up their support of the female existence. The women understand from experience that …show more content…
The two women now have deciphered the truth; John Wright strangled the bird, and Minnie Wright probably strangled her husband. It would be very easy for them to just tell the sheriff and attorney of their discovery; however, their empathy lied in their knowledge of the domestic violence that she was probably subjected to. The death of the birth was probably just what tipped her over the edge and moved her to murder her husband once and for all. The stage directions show the women as both pondering over their discovering but still refraining to withhold it from the men. Mrs. Peters likens a situation from her childhood to Minnie Wright’s to show that she understands her motives, while Mrs. Hale talks about the hardships of married life she had to deal