Trifles

Trifles is a one-act play by Susan Glaspell. The play covers the aftermath of the murder-by-strangulation of a farmer named John Wright. During the play’s first run in 1916 at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Glaspell appeared as the character Mrs. Hale. The play was loosely inspired by the real-life, 1900 murder of John Hossack, an Iowa farmer who died due to axe wounds he sustained while sleeping in bed. His wife, Margaret Hossack, was subsequently tried and convicted—although the verdict was eventually overturned due to a technicality. Glaspell reported on the Hossack murder and the ensuing trial while employed at the Des Moines Daily News. Her journalistic work with the case inspired both Trifles and a short story titled “A Jury of Her Peers.”

The play opens in the somber and empty Wright farmhouse. The County Attorney—George Henderson—and Sheriff Henry Peters converse with Mr. Hale, a neighboring farmer. They repeatedly direct Mr. Hale away from speaking about Mr. Wright’s roughness and non-consideration of his wife, and toward recounting the details of his interaction with Mrs. Wright on the day that the murder was discovered.

Mr. Hale recalls that he stopped by the Wright farmhouse that day to ask if John would “go in with [him] on a party telephone” (6). However, he discovered only Mrs. Wright in the kitchen, passively sitting and pleating an apron. After some prompting, Mrs. Wright informed Mr. Hale that her husband was dead—strangled. He recalled that she told him that she, being a heavy sleeper, slept through her husband’s murder and did not know who did it.

Henry and George rifle through the kitchen, and find there are preserves that have frozen and broken their jars. Mrs. Peters remarks that Mrs. Wright was correct to worry about and anticipate this happening when the gas fire went out, and Henry sarcastically marvels at Mrs. Wright’s frivolity amid facing a murder charge. George replies, “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles” (8). The two men also impugn Mrs. Wright’s housekeeping skills, and Mrs. Hale defends her, saying farms require a lot of work. She also says that Mr. Wright, too, had no homemaking instinct. George remarks that Mrs. Hale is “loyal to [her] sex” (8), while also dismissing Mrs. Hale’s insinuations about Mr. Wright’s cruel, rough character and the unhappiness of his marriage.

The two men proceed up the stairs and the women remain in the kitchen, conversing. Mrs. Hale says, “I’d hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping round and criticizing” (13). She laments the loss of the preserves, and the hard work that must have gone into them. She also recounts a time, 30 years ago, when Minnie Wright was a young and lively girl. Mrs. Peters also remarks that Mrs. Wright requested an apron from jail: “There isn’t much to get you dirty in jail [...] But I suppose [it’s] just to make her feel more natural” (14).

Mrs. Hale asks Mrs. Peters if she thinks that Mrs. Wright is guilty, and Mrs. Peters says that she doesn’t know. “Well I don’t think she did,” says Mrs. Hale, “[a]sking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit” (14). Mrs. Peters remarks that prospects do not look good for Minnie, and the two women also agree that the way that Mr. Wright was rigged up “awful crafty and still” (15) was peculiar. Mrs. Hale also says that her husband is confounded that there was a gun in the house that went unused during the murder. Mrs. Peters remarks that George needs “a motive; something to show anger or—sudden feeling” (15). Mrs. Hale responds that she sees no signs of such things in the kitchen. “You know, it seems kind of sneaking,” she says, “Locking her up in town and then coming out here and trying to get her own house to turn on her!” (15). Mrs. Peters counters, “The law is the law” (15).

Mrs. Peters notices a quilt-in-progress laying on a table. Mrs. Hale wonders aloud whether Mrs. Wright planned on quilting or knotting the piece, and as Henry returns into the room, he says, “They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it” (16), and shares a derisive laugh with George. The women shrink. After the men fall out of earshot, Mrs. Hale grouses about Henry’s derision, while Mrs. Peters makes the excuse that the men have important work to do.

Mrs. Hale, seeing a poorly sewn section of the quilt, promptly rips out the stitches and begins repairing it. Mrs. Hale wonders what could have made Mrs. Wright so nervous as to sew so poorly, and Mrs. Peters replies that it could very well have just been plain tiredness. While looking for a piece of paper and a string, she also happens upon a birdcage in a cabinet. Mrs. Hale recalls that Mrs. Wright used to sing, and conjectures that she may have bought a canary from a peddler that recently came through. The two women try to piece together what may have happened to the canary, as there is no cat in the home.

Mrs. Hale begins to express regret that she did not come by to see Mrs. Wright more often: The two women can clearly sense a cold desolation in the home—murder site or not. Mrs. Peters assures her that she must have been very busy with her own home and children. Mrs. Hale replies, “I could’ve come. I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful—and that’s why I ought to have come” (19). She also states that Mr. Wright was a “hard man […] Just to pass the time of day with him [was] like a raw wind that gets to the bone [...] I should think [Mrs. Wright] would ‘a wanted a bird” (19). She then suggests that Mrs. Peters also bring Mrs. Wright’s quilt to her in jail, as “[i]t might take up her mind” (20).

Mrs. Hale then begins to gather quilting materials and comes upon a handsome box. When she opens it expecting to find Mrs. Wright’s scissors, she finds a dead canary wrapped in silk. Mrs. Peters observes that the canary’s neck has been snapped. The two women exchange “a look of growing comprehension” (21).

George re-enters the room and idly asks the two women if they’ve decided whether Mrs. Wright was going to quilt or knot the blanket, and Mrs. Peters haltingly says that they’ve concluded Mrs. Wright was going to knot it. George then notices the birdcage, and Mrs. Hale claims that she and Mrs. Peters think that a cat may have gotten the bird. When George asks if there is indeed a cat, Mrs. Peters says, “Well, not now. They’re superstitious, you know. They leave” (21). George returns to his conversation with Henry, as if the women’s contributions are nothing but chatter. He tells Henry that there is no sign of forced entry, and that the culprit must have known their way around. They head back upstairs as the two women remain:

[The women] sit there not looking at one another, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they talk now it is in the manner of feeling their way over strange ground, as if afraid of what they are saying, but as if they cannot help saying it (21).

Mrs. Hale offers that Mrs. Wright treasured the bird, as she wished to bury it in a lovely box. Mrs. Peters whispers that she once saw a boy take a hatchet to a kitten, and that she would have hurt the boy if she hadn’t been prevented from doing so. While Mrs. Peters says that they don’t know who actually killed the bird, Mrs. Hale says, “I knew John Wright” (22). Mrs. Peters asserts that the man died in an awful manner. Mrs. Hale repeats the detail about Mr. Wright’s neck and places her hand on the birdcage: “If there’d been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still, after the bird was still” (22). Mrs. Peters says that she is familiar with such stillness: Her two-year-old child died when she and her husband were homesteading in Dakota. She says, “I know what stillness is […] The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale” (23). Mrs. Hale asks who will punish her own crime of never coming to see Mrs. Wright: “We all go through the same things—it's just a different kind of the same thing” (23).

Mrs. Peters nervously states that the men would laugh if they knew that the two women were fussing over the dead canary. Mrs. Hale remarks, “Maybe they would—maybe they wouldn’t” (24). George re-enters the room, saying:

‘No, Peters, it’s all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing. Something to show—something to make a story about—a thing that would connect up with the strange way of doing it’ (24).

Then, “the two women’s eyes meet for an instant” (24) before Lewis Hale enters the room. He says that he is ready to bring Mrs. Wright’s things to jail.

George says that he is going to stay on the property by himself, in order to thoroughly turn it over in the hopes of finding the missing puzzle piece. When Henry asks him if he would like to inspect the items going to Mrs. Wright, he says, “Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out” (24). The stage direction states he then “moves a few things about, disturbing the quilt pieces which cover the box” (24) before stepping back and announcing that Mrs. Peters does not need supervision, as she is “married to the law” (25). Henry tells George that he wants to take a closer look at the window. The two men exit the room under the women’s watchful eyes.

Mrs. Hale intently seeks out Mrs. Peters’ avoidant gaze: “Mrs. Hale holds her, then her own eyes point the way to the spot where the box is concealed” (25). Mrs. Peters clumsily takes up the box and when it won’t fit in her bag, she makes to remove the canary, but cannot bring herself to touch it and instead “goes to pieces” (25). As the doorknob turns, “Mrs. Hale snatches the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat” (25).

George re-enters the room, facetiously saying, “Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?” (25). Mrs. Hale replies, “We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson” (25).