Susan Faludi

My Substitute Capabilities Two women solve a murder with their instincts in a suspenseful story written by Susan Glaspell called “A Jury of Her Peers”. The characters in “A Jury of Her Peers”, precisely the women, each used an alternative literacy to understand what events went on the day a farmer’s wife committed a crime. Alternative literacy is one’s ability to interpret actions of living things or events through counts of practice and knowledge of the matter. Reading animals and people are…

Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" is a one act play based in the early 20th century that includes strong feminist elements that fit well with the time and the world-wide women's rights movement. The play is a murder mystery surrounding the Wrights, Mrs. Wright the wife, and John Wright the murder victim. The story also uses the general mood of society toward women and how they were viewed as beneath most men and not having the intelligence or ability to perform as well as men in most situations. The…

“Lamb to the Slaughter”, a short story written by the celebrated author Roald Dahl, is a story that follows Mary Maloney, a pregnant housewife who had recently found out her husband, a chief detective, was going to leave her. Out of desperation, Mary murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then concealing her wrongdoing and discarding the murder weapon by encouraging the policemen who were investigating the murder to eat it. The most salient idea the author explores is the betrayal;…

In 1893, a woman named Sarah Collins was brutally murdered by her husband, Patrick Collins, in the cloakroom of the kindergarten at which she was a janitress. In his novel, McTeague, Frank Norris eerily echoed this case, which was claimed to be evidence of social Darwinism. The novel, named after the protagonist, is centered on a man named McTeague, a hulking and dim-witted dentist, and the events that befall him and those around him. Though the novel initially met much resistance and little…

Both Trifles by Susan Glaspell and The Sound of a Voice by David Henry Hwang share common traits, despite the obvious differences. They share mysteries and certain portrayals of women during the time periods. These will be discussed along with any influences the authors had when they were writing these plays. The first common trait is the mysteries both plays hold. The murder mystery in Trifles, the mystery of who the woman is in The Sound of a Voice, and the mystery of why the man came to the…

In this module, we have studied Susan Glaspell’s one-act play “Trifles” (1916), Zora Nealle Hurston’s short story “Sweat” (1926), and Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Shawl” (2001). All of the literary works mentioned above all hold some examples of domestic abuse women had to endure during the 20th century. Glaspell’s “Trifles” portrays a clear message about the ways of the two main characters marriage, without them ever appearing on stage. Instead, she leave the audience to interpret the…

Different cultures have a set of rules and guidelines that prescribe the acceptable norms in the society. These gender roles largely determine how women, children and men should conduct themselves within their communities. In Trifles, Susan Glaspell exposes a society that trivializes women’s opinions while upholding the male point of view. The three male characters in the play consistently emphasize the fact that women have a penchant for unimportant things in the society. The dominance…

Women Trifle to the Truth Trifles: a story of opposition, murder, and controversy. Susan Glaspell, writer of Trifles, gave society one of the first feminist stories in American history. Her story was risky in the 1900’s, but it gives us a lot of important information about that time now. For the first time, it makes the women look more intelligent than the men. The play begins when Mr. Wright is strangled to death in his own home. The sheriff, Mr. Hale, and the court attorney all search for…

The exponential growth of social media has spurred the creation of a unique form of communication in today’s culture. What do I meme? The use of the Internet meme has served as a phenomenon that has changed the way people communicate and have had a notable influence on forms of cultural expression. Memes are defined as, “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from one person to another in a culture and often altered in a creative or humorous way (i.e. images, phrases, snapshots, gifs,…

“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks When she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one.” This song is the song made for Lizzie Borden for a pretty special reason. Lizzie Borden was a wealthy Woman who was accused of murdering her father, Andrew Borden, and her stepmother, Abby Borden, with an axe or hatchet on August 4, 1892. At the end of her trial for the murders, she was found innocent, but some say she was still guilty. Many people thought Lizzie Borden was…