Gender Differences And Slavery In Trifles By Susan Glaspell

Amongst all kinds of literature and all through history, women have been minimized to be seen as creatures of the home. Their worth was based on their husband’s worth and the upkeep of the household. To make a female human being subject to only serve one purpose, to please males, is to justify slavery of all kinds. On the account of gender roles, women throughout the ages have suffered structural slavery to men and experienced belittlement to a degree no man has ever dreamed of encountering. In the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, Minnie Wright could not endure any more of the day to day injustices and killed her husband, John Wright. The investigation of this murder leaves the men and women involved divided. Gender roles were the base of why …show more content…
Karen Alkalay-Gut analyzes the circumstances, “The fact that Minnie strangled her husband because he strangled the bird indicates to Mrs. Hale that 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). The established gender roles, indefinitely, caused the murder to transpire. Minnie Foster’s imposed gender role as the docile and attentive wife eventually drove her to madness because of her husband’s dominant and overbearing gender role. Throughout the play, Trifles proved time and time again how unjust and cruel gender roles could be. Not only do they take a psychological toll on the female characters, but the gender roles ultimately led the men into failure. Instead of working together, the men’s condescending outlooks on the women push the women together. When the women chose to not share their findings it was a mark of their solidarity to not endanger a fellow female. The gender roles are the foundation to the division amongst the investigators and as to why the case goes