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In Glaspell's Trifles, the Wrights represent a moral lesson that only the women seem to grasp. This inability to understand by the men comes from the different mindsets and ideas men and women are accustomed to, and Glaspell's manipulation of the details in her play illustrates this. Although on the surface, this play seems to be a simple murder case, the apparent reversed order of events lets readers know the play does not follow the usual rules of solving a mystery (Russell).
Quite quickly readers know who is guilty and what she has done, yet, ironically, the reason for having the characters on stage is solely to find this out—at least for the men, this is true. The transformations the women undergo juxtapose the unchanged knowledge and attitudes the men end up with. While these transformations may seem to revolve around the women's decisions to hold back their knowledge, they mostly revolve around why trifles are essential in understanding the differences between a women's and a man's world.
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Glaspell portrays the different world men and women live in through her illustrations of three divisions that create them—the mentalities of men and women, the difference between law and justice that emerge throughout the play, and the outside world and that of the kitchen.
At the beginning of the play, the men and and relates en are divided by physical distances and their positions in the town, they are seen in two groups with differences extending to their general attitudes, for instance, Glaspell writes as she introduces the scene that the women stand close to the door, even a little fearful.
At the details of how the scene is set up, readers are forced to assume that the men are in charge of the investigation while the women are there to pick up objects for Mrs. Wright, as she has already been arrested. This division is not only physical but also mental because the two sexes have different mindsets already as they walk into the house.
The men have in mind the particular goal find evidence that Mrs. Wright is guilty, and the women have a much smaller goal in mind, thus placing the men already at higher importance among the two groups. In addition, this division extends to include the particular objects and ideas the men and women find important to the case. The men seem to be focused solely on the sequence of events after the murder, in other words, the events that are public and were witnessed. Yet the women find the small details of the house to be largely significant in helping decode how the Wrights lived, or their relationship, which the women realize to be crucial to the case while the men are indifferent to such details, even going as far as demeaning the women for making comments or inquiries about "trifles.
There is one important moral lesson Glaspell decides to illustrate through her character's actions in the story. The use of actions rather than thoughts is also a significant tool Glaspell uses because it refers to how the women use certain language to communicate to covertly hold back information they discover from the men. The group of men at the beginning of the story represents another division which is the concept of law, defined and finite in the world of man Yet in a world of women, individual circumstances are influential as well, and for men, according to Glaspell, they are not part of the equation (Alkalay-Gut). As the groups walk through the house and come upon the kitchen, the sheriff says, "nothing here but kitchen things", making it clear that he has determined nothing meaningful about the details of the kitchen (Glaspell 25). After this comment, the county attorney looks in the cupboard and everyone notices the fruit jars have broken, and Mrs. Peters says that Mrs. Wright was worried about this happening (Glaspell 27). The three men then each say something to the effect that “trifles” are silly things to worry about. Their action of demeaning the things the women mention furthers the divide and pushes the women to band together, abandon the concept of law that men live by, and accept the moral lesson Minnie provides, which is idea that the law and justice do not always stand side by side (Alkalay-Gut).
The outside world and the world of the kitchen, which is a symbol of the woman's world, can only be differentiated once the women bond and are alienated from the men and the concept of always following the law. Once they are no longer tied to “society and its definitions”, they can finally materialize from the shadows of their husbands and make their own decisions about what to do with the information they discover (Alkalay-Gut). As the woman relatetherelate relateworkwomen relatescan to the isolation and depression that Mrs. Wright was surrounded by, for example, finding the dead canary awakens Mrs. Peter's suppressed childhood memories, the women are able to understand Mrs. Wright's rage and emerge from behind their roles as wives (Russell). Loyalty to the circumstances Minnie is subjected to and sympathy for the life change she undergoes when she gets married and the simple, cheerless life she seems to live, which Mrs. Hale mentions to readers when she says that Minnie Foster used to be lively, brings the women to a deeper understanding of why a woman's world is different from a man's.
In Trifles, two worlds are illustrated using the themes of isolation and female bonding to create a clear understanding of the existing gap between the sexes (Sebesta, Black 647).
Usually, in a murder story, people are divided into two groups: the law-abiding and the guilty, yet in this story, people are divided by sex—men versus women (Alkalay Gut). Illustrating the man and woman's world through her character's reactions allows Glaspell to also cite a gap between law and fairness. This way, she connects law to man and fairness, or morality, to woman. The illustrated gap between the sexes also allows all these points to be connected at the end of the play when Mrs. Hale tells Mr. Henderson, “We call it-knot it”. Mrs. Hale refers to both Mr. Wright's method of physical death, the knot around his neck, and the significance, or role played by, the language women use once they realize that they in fact can't relate to men as easily as they can to women simply because they are not familiar with the other's roles in society, often because a man's role is held at a higher esteem than a woman's. After all, the most important cause for differentiating between the two worlds is for the women to understand that the gap between man and woman exists and what this means when concerning how the law can apply to situations surrounding either sex.
The Different World of Men and Women in Trifles, a Play by Susan Glaspell. (2022, Aug 24). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-different-world-of-men-and-women-in-trifles-a-play-by-susan-glaspell-essay
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