Trifles- by Susan Glaspell- Summary, Characters, Analysis, Themes and Symbols (Grade 11 English New Course)

 

Trifles- Characters

·       Minnie Wright is a woman accused of killing her husband, John Wright. The women investigating her home uncover evidence that suggests Minnie was abused.

·         George Henderson is the county attorney who will prosecute Minnie for murder.

·         Sheriff Henry Peters is leading the investigation into John's murder.

·         Lewis Hale is the neighbor who discovered John Wright's death.

·         Mrs. Hale is Lewis Hale's wife. She empathizes with Minnie and conceals the evidence of Minnie's crime.

·         Mrs. Peters is the sheriff's wife, who helps Mrs. Hale hide the evidence.

 

Lewis Hale

Lewis Hale is a farmer and neighbor of the Wright family. A straightforward, honest man, Hale is a bit rough around the edges from the harsh life of a rural farmer.

Hale was the first to discover John’s murder when he stopped by the Wright’s farmhouse to interest them in sharing a telephone line. He is slow to judgment and hesitant to suggest that Minnie may have been involved somehow.

Mrs. Hale

Mrs. Hale is the wife of Lewis. At first timid, she eventually commits what she thinks is a justifiable crime: a conspiracy to conceal evidence from a murder investigation.

Mrs. Hale accompanies her husband to the crime scene to gather items for the imprisoned Minnie. As the men search the house for clues, however, Mrs. Hale gets frustrated with their patronizing attitude; she understands and empathizes with Minnie’s isolation and alienation. In their youth, she was friends with Minnie, who was then a vivacious and interesting girl. She knew Minnie was isolated and probably lonely after her marriage; moreover, she noticed her change into a drab, quiet woman as the years passed.

Of the two women in the play, Mrs. Hale seems to be more observant and more prone to action. It is she who notices most of the clues first—the bread left outside the box, the hasty quilt stitching, and the dead canary in Mrs. Wright’s sewing kit. She is the one who suggests that John was an unhappy, abusive man who may have deserved his fate.

Ultimately, it is Mrs. Hale who hides the dead canary—evidence suggesting a motive for the crime—in her coat pocket to prevent the men from finding it.

 

 

George Henderson

George Henderson is the attorney that will eventually prosecute Minnie. He is younger than the other characters; accordingly, he is more brash, sarcastic, and foolish. When questioning Hale about John’s murder he misses important details.

Unlike Hale and Peters, Henderson is quick to make judgments. At the end of the play, he mocks Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters for their interest in whether Minnie was going to quilt or knot her sewing project, not realizing the answer was actually one of the clues he was seeking.

 

Henry Peters

As sheriff in the small, rural town, Henry Peters plays a surprisingly small part in the investigation of John’s murder. He visited the farmhouse the day before, found John’s body, arrested Minnie, and secured the premises.

The morning of the investigation, Peters sent one of his men out to build a fire and warm the house. Now, he has turned the investigation over to Henderson and says very little himself.

 

Mrs. Peters

In some ways, Mrs. Peters is an outsider in this bleak, rural community. Unlike Mrs. Hale, she did not know Minnie as a young woman and therefore doesn’t see the toll living with John had taken on her.

However, she does understand the loneliness and rage Minnie felt. As a child, she watched angrily and helplessly as a boy viciously killed her kitten with a hatchet. Later in life, while she and her husband were living in the Dakota countryside, her two-year-old baby died.

Mrs. Peters begins the play as the cautionary voice of reason, warning Mrs. Hale, ‘‘I don’t think we ought to touch things.’’ By the end, however, she empathizes with Minnie’s actions and helps Mrs. Hale conceal evidence.

Trifles Themes

Gender: the male characters only want to gather evidence of Minnie's crime, whereas the women come to understand the emotional pain that drove Minnie to murder her husband.

Isolation: Minnie Wright is isolated from her friends and family by her controlling, abusive husband. This has devastating psychological effects on Minnie.

Justice: Men and women have different conceptions of justice. The men want Minnie to be convicted of murder, whereas the women hide the evidence that would have convicted Minnie out of respect for the years of abuse Minnie suffered.

Trifles- Summary

The one-act play Trifles begins after Sheriff Henry Peters and county attorney George Henderson visit the Wrights' home to investigate the murder of John Wright. His wife, Minnie Wright, has been arrested for the murder, and the two men have come to collect evidence against her. To that end, they have brought Lewis Hale, Minnie Wright's neighbor, who was the first person other than Minnie to see John's dead body. The three men are Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, and Mrs. Hale, Lewis's wife, who have come to collect some of Minnie's personal effects to bring to her in prison. The sheriff is the first to enter the Wrights' little farmhouse. He and the other two men gather around the hot stove for warmth while the women linger in the doorway.

Inside, the men begin their investigation. Henderson questions Hale about the events of the previous day. Hale recounts how he was going to town with a sack of potatoes when he stopped at the Wright farm, wondering if the Wrights would like to share a telephone line. He found Minnie in her rocking chair behaving strangely. She told him that John was upstairs, dead, with a rope around his neck. At the time, Minnie claimed that John was strangled in his sleep by an unknown assailant and said she did not hear the strangling because she "sleeps sound." Minnie was arrested and is now awaiting trial for the murder of her husband. She has been in jail for a full day at this point and needs a fresh change of clothes, which is why Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale have come—out of kindness.

Henderson suggests that the men have a look around, thinking they might find some clues. The men decide not to search the room where Lewis Hale found Minnie, because, according to Sheriff Peters, there is "nothing here but kitchen things." Sheriff Peters decides they are going to focus on the bedroom and the barn, where, they assume, the real clues will be found. When Henderson searches a cupboard, he finds several broken jars of preserves. He dismisses these jars as "trifles," even though Minnie specifically mentioned the preserves, fearing that the jars would break in the freeze. While the men are upstairs, the women conduct the real investigation. As soon as they are alone, they begin gathering things to bring to Minnie in prison: a change of clothes, a shawl, a pleated apron. This leads them to some important discoveries.

First, the women note how dull and shabby Minnie's clothes are. Mrs. Hale says, ‘‘She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster," meaning that marrying John changed her. Wright was an abusive, hot-tempered man and forced Minnie to wear boring house clothes instead of the pretty clothes she likes. This is the first indication that Minnie was unhappy with her controlling husband. Then there are the little things: the bread left out to get stale; the table only half-cleaned, a quilt with crooked, erratic stitching that reflects Minnie's mental state. Things were going downhill, the women realize, long before the murder. Their suspicions are confirmed when they find the final, most important clues: a broken birdcage and a dead canary. It is likely that John broke this birdcage, though it is unclear exactly why, beyond his general cruelty. Minnie has been keeping the canary in a sewing box, wrapped up in silk-like a treasure. This bird is symbolic of Minnie herself, who used to sing in the town's choir before she married.

 

When the men reappear suddenly, Mrs. Hale intuitively hides the sewing box and makes up a lie about a cat attacking the canary to explain away the presence of the birdcage. Before they leave, the men decide to take one last look upstairs. This gives the women time to discuss what to do. Both of them have come to sympathize with Minnie, understanding why she murdered her abusive husband. Mrs. Peters remembers what it was like when she lived on a farm with her husband. Life was rough then, and she lost her baby on the homestead. She isn't surprised that Minnie felt pushed beyond her limits. Together, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale decide to hide the evidence they have found as to Minnie's motive. Unsurprisingly, the men take no notice, thinking of these items as mere "trifles."

Trifles Analysis

·         Trifles is a one-act play set in a small farmhouse. The action takes place in the course of a single day, satisfying the Aristotelian theory of unity.

·         Gender is the central theme of the play. All three of the men are so focused on gathering evidence to use against Minnie in court that they ignore the signs that illuminate her emotional state leading up to the murder.

·         Minnie's dead canary is a symbol of lost freedom. Its cage, broken during one of John Wright's rages, is symbolic of Minnie's marriage, which isolates her from her community.

Detailed Analysis

Trifles tell the story of two investigations into the murder of John Wright. The male characters carry on the official investigation while the female characters carry on their own unofficial investigation.

 

The play opens when its five characters enter the kitchen of the Wright farmhouse. The county attorney takes charge of the investigation, guiding the sheriff and Mr. Hale in recounting their roles in the discovery of the crime. Mr. Hale tells how he came to the house to ask John Wright about sharing the cost of a phone line, only to find Mrs. Wright sitting in a rocker. When he asks to speak with her husband, Mrs. Wright says that he cannot speak with Mr. Hale because he is dead. Mr. Hale investigates and finds that Wright has been hanged. After commenting on Mrs. Wright’s poor housekeeping in ways that irritate the women present, the county attorney leads the men upstairs so he can search the scene of the crime for a motive.

The women are left alone. While gathering some household goods to make Mrs. Wright feel more at ease in jail, they discuss Minnie Wright, her childhood as Minnie Foster, her life with John Wright, and the quilt that she was making when she was taken to jail. The men reenter briefly, then leave. The women discuss the state of the Wright household before Mr. Wright’s death. In the process, they communicate how greatly Mrs. Wright had changed over the years and how depressing her life with John Wright had been. The women express sympathy over what the kitchen disarray would mean emotionally to Mrs. Wright and how much of an intrusion it was for her to have all of these outsiders searching through her goods. The women discover Mrs. Wright’s pet bird. It has been killed, and Mrs. Wright had hidden it in her sewing box. The women’s eyes meet, but they do not speak directly about the bird. When she hears the men returning again, Mrs. Hale hides the dead bird.

Once the men have left again, the women discuss past pains and losses that parallel those that Mrs. Wright has suffered. A boy killed Mrs. Peters’s kitten when she was a child, and she was childless for a time, like Mrs. Wright. The women express a shared sense of responsibility for her isolation and suggest that they were criminally negligent to allow her to be entirely alone. Just before the men reenter, Mrs. Peters suggests that they are getting too upset over a dead bird.

The county attorney summarizes the case as he enters and indicates that the entire case is clear except for a missing motive. As the investigation ends, the sheriff asks the attorney if he needs to inspect the things the women are taking to Mrs. Wright in jail. The county attorney dismisses this jokingly, suggesting that there is no need because the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, is essentially married to the law. When the men leave the room to check one last detail, the women’s eyes meet again. Mrs. Peters tries to hide the box containing the dead bird in the bag of quilt pieces she is taking to Mrs. Wright, but it does not fit. Mrs. Hale hides the box in her coat pocket. When the men reenter, the women have one last chance to share this clue with them. They do not, and the play closes. 

Discuss the Symbols in Trifles

Rocking Chair

The rocking chair represents Mrs. Wright's nervousness and impatience.

When she is in the chair, Mr. Hale asks to see her husband and she calmly responds with he can't. He's dead. He dies of a rope around her neck. This raises suspicion about Mrs. Wright.

Jars of Preserves

The jars represent her sanity as a whole.

Whenever the fire would go out, the temperature would go down in the house, and the jars would crack and break. When they break, that symbolizes she reached her breaking point and that's when she snaps and chokes Mr. Wright.

The Rope

The rope is a symbol of her revenge and rebellion against her husband.

It is the rope used to strangle Mr. Wright. He had strangled her beloved pet which was the only thing keeping her company when he was always gone. So, out of revenge she took the rope and choked the life out of him.

The Quilt

The quilt represents her mental instability.

Since she was always home alone she spent most of her time making quilts. In the play, Mrs. Hale points out that the one she was working on was so nice and even then the pattern went all over the place. She started knotting it instead of sewing it and that showed her ability to knot things like a rope.

The Bird Cage

The birdcage represents Mrs. Wright's life as a whole and how she had limited space and freedom.

The cage leads Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale to the real evidence. They try to finish the quilt for Mrs. Wright and as they look for scissors they stumble upon the deceased bird. Mrs. Peters mentions that someone had wrung the bird's neck. It shows there is a clear distinction between men's and women's roles. The husband is out working all day and she's forced to stay home "in her cage".

The Bird

The bird represents Mrs. Wright's spirit and freedom.

Mrs. Hale even says in the play that "she comes to think of it, she was kind like a bird herself- real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and fluttery." After Mr. Wright had killed the bird that's when Mrs. Wright decided to finally kill him. She grabbed the rope and choked the life out of him.