The Birdcage

Susan Glaspell, born in 1876 was an American play writer, novelist, journalist, and actress. In her time, she wrote many short stories and plays which began appearing in magazines and journals. One of Glaspell’s best works was a one-act play called Trifles written and performed in 1916. While working as a journalist for Des Monines Daily News, she covered the 1900 murder of John Hossack which is where she received the inspiration for the loosely based play and in 1917 was turned into a short…

Famous Figure Journal 4: Robin Williams Robin Williams was a famous actor and comedian known for his improvisational performances. Some of his greatest work is the Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting. Additionally, he suffered from Lewy body dementia and chronic depression. Background Information/Accomplishments The famous comedian and actor Robin Williams was born on July 21, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois (Biography.com, 2016). Shortly after developing his own improvisational style as a…

Mindfulness training (MT) is now a heavily researched practice that is seeing a resurgence in western culture. Mindfulness can broadly be defined as a practice in which a person uses techniques to help train the mind to reduce stress and increase awareness. Researchers Farb, Anderson, Bean, McKeon, Mayberg, and Segal are the first to look at a reduction in the expression of sadness through MT by looking at fMRI images of the brain to locate specific regions that have been associated with sadness…

The aspects of the racial caste system is defined as a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom. Alexander contends that Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and slavery were all caste systems. The original Jim Crow laws, that were put into place after slavery, advocated racial discrimination in public housing, employment, voting, and education. The Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s apparently ended the Jim Crow era by winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act of…

The creation and support of sexist and racist thinking is continued/[PROLONGED????] by a combination of forces that work in ways such that when one is attacked, the others are able to uphold it. This is [also] true in the case of an individual force, such as the effect of an ideologically created ‘reality’ on members of a society, or the oppression of women of all class levels and races. They are intertwined, crossing paths and building on each other, impossible to rip apart completely,…

Class System In Trifles we see the class system throughout the whole play, we can see this as the upper class being the men, the middle class as the women, and the lower class as the children and the bird. The men are shown as the upper class. How is this so? Well first off we can see this is happening, in how the men are know it alls, and whatever they do is definitely right. It is also shown through how the men talk down to the women and the common objects. This all starts…

Oppression has been around for a long time since the start of the United States, and there are still modern day “bird cages” that trap individuals into certain duties. A “bird cage” of oppression in today’s world is the role of women in the US. Women back in the day were seen as the weaker gender that stayed at home, cooked food, and took care of kids. Now in 2015, not much has changed in the minds of America. There has still not been a female president, it is hard to climb the ranks in the…

men discount such trifles as “kitchen things,” food, and housework” (“Feminisms: The Debate over Realism” 207). Things like her sewing and disarray in the kitchen enabled Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to sense Minnie’s distress. They then noticed the birdcage and deciphered that John Wright had killed Mrs. Wright’s canary, and that this is what officially put Minnie over the edge (Glaspell 609). The women began to notice what the men ignored and eventually put the puzzle together (Levin 178). If the…

If you had just murdered your spouse, would your first concern be of your canned cherries? A comparison of the short story “ A Jury of Her Peers” and the dramatic adaptation of Trifles can start with the many similarities. The setting is well defined in both, as the story takes place in Dickson County, Nebraska. This is in the farm belt of the United States, with all of the characters lives revolving around the rural atmosphere in the early part of the 1900’s. The season is cold and wintry,…

Gender discrimination is discriminations based on gender or sex and they can be seen through many countries or fiction and nonfiction texts. In Trifles, a fiction play written by Susan Glaspell, talks the investigation after the murder of John Wright, the victim. This play shows the discrimination between the men and women because while investigating the men disregard the evidences that are perceive as feminine things. This discrimination is related to situations stated by the two nonfiction…