Essays on Trifles

A quilt is traditional blanket made up of three layers. Quilting is the process of joining at least two fabric layers by stitches. Trifle refers to something that is not of a high value or rather something of little value. According to the plot of Trifles, Mrs. Hale discovered that Mrs. Wright must have been piercing a quilt. It was said to be pretty but as she was examining it she noticed that there was a part that seemed all out of place (780). This implied that when Mrs. Wright began sawing it, she was fine but during the

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The words that a playwright chooses, i.e. the language, is one of the elements of drama that moves the action and plot of the play along, while it also helps define the various characters and provides exposition. Playwrights tend to come up with their own particular style in when it comes to the language they opt to use in order to establish character and dialogue. In the play Trifles, Susan Glaspell uses symbolic language as both an element of drama and a literary device in order to highlight her theme. Symbolic language has been used in the play to

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Background and Setting

“Trifles” is a one-act play written by Susan Glaspell in 1916. Glaspell brought base for her play from a real murder story of a former John Hossack, the case that she had covered when she was a journalist with Des Moines Daily News Paper. In that case, the victim’s wife, Mrs. Margaret, was suspected as a murderer. Based on this story, she built a story for her one-act play, “Trifles.” The action of the play revolves around a murder of a farmer Mr. John Wright. Someone put him to death by strangling him by a rope. His wife

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Introduction:

Susan Glaspell was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and co-founder of the Provincetown Players, America’s first modern American theater company. A powerful woman of time she has a lasting effect into today’s literary world. In her writing, she looked at the inequality of how society treated sexes differently and the difficulties of women faced if they tried to live independently by trying to live their own lives without relying on men and how they circumvented the attempts at social repression. .
The Provincetown Players provided a stage for her to mature as a writer. The Provincetown Players were

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There are various approaches of women and feminism in the literature of the early 20th century. For depicting the feminine psych, authors use various literary devices for allowing readers to enter the mind of their characters. Susan Glaspell’s “Trifle” uses symbolism and irony for resenting her character, Mrs. Wright and for illustrating her hardships that drove her to murdering her husband. Moreover, after studying Glaspell’s “Trifle”, the manner in which she develops the narration indicates that she considers Mrs. Wright’s action as justified. Mrs. Wright, a character of the early 20th century, resembles Kate Chopin’s

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For centuries, various societies have always defined the role of women and men. These roles continue to change and evolve as time pass. However, it is only in recent times that women began to break away from the roles that defined them. Nowadays, there is more of a demand throughout many societies for women to be seen and treated as equal to a man. In Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" and Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House", both writers' uses female protagonists in situations that many would think of as being male dominate.
Glaspell and Ibsen use the female characters point of

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The original title of Trifles was Jury of Her Peers: The Importance of Trifles, explores the gap between male and female perceptions of judgment. The central character never appears on stage. Mrs. Wright’s husband John Wright was murdered in his sleep and is already in jail, now the sheriff, the neighbor who discovered the crime and the County Attorney are back looking for evidence of the wife’s guilt. The wives come too. After the men dismiss the contents of the kitchen as trifles, nothing but women’s things and go upstairs to find hard evidence the women

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‘Name’

‘Instructor’s name’
‘Subject’
The play trifles by Susan Glaspell, premiered in 1916, was considered far ahead of its time in terms of its theme and presentation, by many critics of that era. Despite of its many localized elements like way of speech, customs and setting, the play enjoys a universal acclaim. Though almost a century has passed since the play was first staged, the play still has an enduring appeal. The main reason behind the timelessness of this play is the simple, strong, universal and time-proof theme of the play which is – men do not appreciate women. Yes,

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Trifles

1. Setting
The play Trifles takes place during a cold weather in the early 20th century .It takes place in a deserted farmhouse in the American Midwest. Glaspell in this play utilizes simple but effective setting elements to generate suspense in a bid to understand or resolve the mysterious murder that has happened on Minnie Wright farm. The choice of place, time and weather does a good job in attaining a mood characteristic to the mystery surrounding the murder. An important emotion evoked by the setting is disgust and disturbance. Moreover, the choice of characters plays an equally important

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According to Laurence Perrine, there are two primary purposes for any literature – to entertain and enlighten. While entertaining is the easier part, Perrine opines that a literature should do more than just entertain, if it is worth scholarly scrutiny. Thus, a fiction can be categorized into escape and interpretive literature. An escape literature is one, which mainly aims at entertaining and intended as a time pass. Whereas, an interpretive literature aims at making the reader delve more intensely into the world around him. While an escape literature aims at taking its reader away from his

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Food is often very closely tied to familial and cultural experiences; time spent cooking food, making food, and sitting around the dinner table reveals much about a family dynamic, as well as the connective tissue that combines all of our experiences. The preparation of food is a nearly-universal cultural experience, and every family, every culture has their own unique ways of behaving and working in the kitchen. However, historically the role of primary food preparer and slave to the kitchen has been women; different women react to this role in different ways, which is a subject often explored in

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Question 1

- Chorus
Chorus is a literary device that refers to the situation when people do something in unison. It was used in the ancient Greek drama. As seen in Lysistrata when the old women chastised the younger women when they said they would not give in to the demands of their husbands (pg 149).
- Dramatic irony
Dramatic irony is seen when the audience or readers get to know certain things that certain characters in the play do not know. An example of dramatic irony in ‘trifles’ is when the women find the evidence to show that Mrs. Wright

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Glaspell, Susan. Trifles, A Play In One Act. Baker's Plays, 1951. Print.
In Susan Glaspell’s play, “Trifles,” is a feminist drama that primarily takes place on a farmhouse, which is the scene of a murder, and dialogues keep shifting from one character to another. Henry Peters, the sheriff and Lewis Hale, a neighboring farmer arrive at the Wright farmhouse with their wives and George Henderson, the county attorney to investigate the murder of Mr. John Wright. Lewis Hale retells Mrs. Minnie Wright’s story, who claimed that her she was asleep when Mr. Wright was murdered, and was

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In the one-act play, Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, the Wright household sees the entry of the sheriff, his wife, the neighbors, county attorney and Mr. and Mrs. Hale. They all enter the kitchen while Mr. Hale describes his visit to the house when Mrs. Wright behaving in a bizarre way had eventually expressed in a hebetudinous voice that her spouse was dead, upstairs. Mrs. Wright is never seen onstage. The men seem to be sure of the fact that she had killed her husband as she had queerly claimed that someone had strangled Mr. Wright while she was sound

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Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written in 1917 that revolves around the murder of a farmer, John Wright. Minnie Wright, John’s wife, is arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband and awaits trial. Sheriff Peters and Lewis Hale, accompanied by their wives, and George Henderson, a country attorney, travel to the crime scene, the isolated house. The women join their husbands to collect some of Minnie’s personal items. Initially, Mrs. Hale feels sympathy for Minnie and she expresses her disapproval of how the men are “snoopin’ round and criticizin’” her

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In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare uses irony in different ways. Sometimes it is used for humorous purposes, and sometimes for dramatic purposes. It works because the audience hears the character saying one thing, and yet the audience knows that the literal meaning is not true, and in fact the opposite is true. By using irony in both humorous and dramatic scenes, Shakespeare allows the audience to enjoy the experience of sometimes knowing more than another character does about what is really happening. In contrast, the irony in Trifles is not so much a play on words as it

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"Trifles" by Susan Glaspell is a play replete with symbolism part of this is in what is not said as much as it is in what is spoken. The play is about a farmer’s murder. Mr. Wright was found dead with a rope knotted around his neck and the men believe his wife did it. When the play opens, she has already been arrested and taken away to jail and the farmhouse kitchen is abandoned. Nothing was put into order before the wife was taken away to jail. The sheriff enters first then the

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Trifles, by Glaspell Susan, is a play that tries to draw the line between morally correct and incorrect actions. This it attempts through the choice of moral development schemas, which either seek to uphold morally correct principles which are applicable universally or those which are differentiated and reflective in nature, dynamic with changing sets of circumstances. However, through the play, the issue of feminism or the lack of it is clearly brought up (Gilligan 39).
In this play, a murder most foul occurs. A woman referred to as Minnie Wright is the main suspect in her husband’s murder

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"Trifles" by Susan Glaspell
"Trifles" by Susan Glaspell is a play replete with symbolism. While the men go and search the crime scene for forensic evidence, their two wives solve the crime by examining the small trifling details in the kitchen. Each of these is symbolic of a greater truth in another woman’s life. More by what is left unsaid than spoken it is clear they can do this because they relate to the small details of a marriage turned bleak. They can do this because the symbolism of these trifles is so strong that the third woman

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Trifles, by Glaspell Susan, is a play that tries to draw the line between morally correct and incorrect actions. This it attempts through the choice of moral development schemas, which either seek to uphold morally correct principles which are applicable universally or those which are differentiated and reflective in nature, dynamic with changing sets of circumstances (Gilligan 39). In relation to morality as a theme in ‘Trifle’, the differentiating factor according to many is the choice between the psychological logic of people’s relationships and the universally accepted and politically correct formal logic of fairness.
In this play, a

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Part I. The men in Trifles act like they are professional detectives who are on the track of a deadly killer. Unfortunately, in their haste to look impressive, they forget to check out items in the kitchen, such as the ruined preserves and the dead canary that is wrapped up in the quilting material. These “trifles” would have given them insight into the personality of the murderer, as well as some of the emotional influences she had been undergoing. Rather than look at the “kitchen things,” the men dismiss them, saying that “women are used to worrying over trifles” (

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The American Dream has proven to be a highly elusive goal for many people. While there are quite a few stories of people who made themselves into successes, for many other people, that success has not only proven to be hard to come by, the difficulties of life, even in America, have shown that human nature can overcome even the best of intentions. From the very earliest American writers, such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to such satirists as H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain, to the pessimistic worldviews that emerged during the Jazz Age with Fitzgerald and Hemingway,

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Much Ado about Nothing in the movie by Kenneth Branagh

Despite the law that exists to protect women in the society against inequality, men still look down upon women and still nothing is done about the oppression. This is a concept that is evident in the two plays as we can be able to see women in the play ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ being manipulated at will and the ones in the play ‘the trifles’ also being looked down upon by their male counterparts. Much Ado about Nothing is a comedy that was initially written by William Shakespeare and

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‘Stubborn Husband, Stubborn Wife’ – Traditional Persian Tale

‘The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses’ – Bessie Head

An Interpretative Analysis

These three texts differ greatly in many ways. The dates of their composition are separated by many years and the social context in which they were written is greatly different. Trifles might be said to be a proto-feminist work in the way it describes the marriage of John and Minnie Wright, and in the way that Mrs Hale and Mrs. Peters understand why Minnie Wright killed her husband and conspire to keep the truth from the police in sisterly solidarity with Minnie Wright. ‘The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses’ is

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