Trifles

“COUNTY ATTORNEY: (Looking around) I guess we’ll go upstairs first—and then out to the barn and around there. (To sheriff) You’re convinced that there was nothing important here—nothing that would point to any motive?

SHERIFF: Nothing here but kitchen things.” 

This quotation highlights the men's habitual underestimation of women, and the dismissal of the domestic space—and the secrets and intelligence that hide within it. In their arrogant, masculine search for evidence, George and Henry are implicitly searching for a “masculine” (or in other words, a “consequential”) piece of evidence. Because of their conditioning to habitually dismiss anything from the female realm as trifles, they let the crucial piece of evidence escape their own notice. They are both underestimating and dismissing women—to their own detriment. 

“COUNTY ATTORNEY: ...Dirty towels! (kicks his foot against pans under the sink) Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?

MRS. HALE: (Stiffly) There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm.

COUNTY ATTORNEY: (With conciliation) To be sure.”

This highlights the contempt and disrespect that George shows toward Mrs. Wright’s kitchen and her work. It exemplifies the manner in which women’s domestic work is summarily dismissed and derided by men, who do not know how to do the work, and who do not do it. The quotation also depicts Mrs. Hale’s discomfort with the man’s unjust rudeness, as she takes up for Mrs. Wright. George’s condescending pacification of the woman also speaks to his ignorance and obliviousness: Even Mrs. Hale’s announced solidarity with Mrs. Wright does not rouse George from his sexist slumber, and he does not take Mrs. Hale’s solidarity (which ends up spurring her to hide evidence from him) seriously. This quotation therefore highlights the subtle way that men only understand power and guile on their terms, and as enacted by other men. George’s misogyny blinded him to the intelligence and wit of women, as he is content to merely conciliate to and dismiss Mrs. Hale and her vocal solidarity—rather than seeing this as a possible monkey wrench in and serious threat to his investigation. His habitual dismissal and underestimation of women is his own undoing in this case.  

“COUNTY ATTORNEY: No—it’s not cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct.

MRS. HALE: Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either.

COUNTY ATTORNEY: You mean that they didn’t get on very well?

MRS. HALE: I don’t mean anything. But I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller [sic] for John Wright’s being in it.”

This passage parses George’s gendered assumptions. In his mind, it is completely up to the wife to maintain a cheerful home. But Mrs. Hale acutely points out that Mr. Wright could also have taken responsibility for himself and for the cheer of his home: Her rejoinder points to her assertion that the emotional labor of a household should not fall on the wife alone. Mrs. Hale also shrewdly takes the conversation away from anything that could incriminate Mrs. Hale and sticks to her assertion that John Wright was a hard and cold man just as responsible, if not more so, for the lack of cheer in the home. 

“MRS. HALE: Duty’s all right, but I guess that deputy sheriff that came out to make the fire might have got a little of this on [...] Wish I’d thought of that sooner. Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up when she had to come away in such a hurry.” 

Mrs. Hale speaks this passage. In it, she reflects on the cruelty and unfairness of George coming into Mrs. Wright’s kitchen, disrespectfully rifling through it, and faulting Mrs. Wright for the disarray. Mrs. Hale observes that the male deputy who was previously in the house could have done a little something to light the flame and prevent Mrs. Wright’s preserves from freezing and breaking their jars. This quotation intriguingly points out two things. The first is the men have no idea how to maintain a household, and have no consideration for the ways that the planning, skills, and consideration of women hold a household together. Simultaneous to this ignorance and obliviousness is the derision and dismissal of such domestic skills and duties. Mrs. Hale acutely notes both the ignorance and injustice of men in this quotation. 

“MRS. HALE: Wright was close. I think maybe that’s why she kept so much to herself. She didn’t even belong to Ladies’ Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn’t do her part, and then you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that was—oh, thirty years ago.” 

In this quotation, Mrs. Hale lends humanity to the absent Mrs. Wright. In this way, Glaspell highlights the dramatic purpose of Mrs. Wright’s absence from the play. As the two investigating men have clearly decided Mrs. Wright is guilty, and she sits in a jail cell, she has effectively been silenced. She cannot speak to her own suffering in the home and her marriage, and both the law and the men in charge of administering it have already decided that Mrs. Wright’s experience in the marriage does not matter as much as does the murder of her husband. Mrs. Hale, however, has taken it upon herself to recognize the humanity of the silenced woman, which she here highlights by speaking to her former happiness and liveliness during a time before her marriage—a time dismissed and ignored by both men and a society at large that circumscribes the lives and identities of women to strictly that of wife and mother. Mrs. Hale is therefore undertaking a complex and subtle form of resistance. 

“MRS PETERS: Mr. Peters says it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech and he’ll make fun of her sayin’ she didn’t wake up.” 

Mrs. Peters highlights the fact that her own husband, the Sheriff, has already decided that Mrs. Wright is guilty although he has no evidence. It speaks to his immediate indictment of Mrs. Wright. His gendered solidarity with Mr. Wright, presumption of Mrs. Wright’s guilt, and the foregone conclusion that no amount of cruelty or mistreatment on Mr. Wright’s part could justify his murder, leads him to lack compassion or consideration for Mrs. Wright.

“MRS. PETERS: No, it’s strange. It must have been done awful crafty and still. They say it was such a—funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like that.” 

Mrs. Peters' statement here exemplifies the secret knowledge and sisterhood of women. For one, as the women talk, they are the ones uncovering the background and motive for the crime—while being dismissed and condescended to by the men who are the purported experts undertaking the investigation. The quotation implies that the handiwork of the crime speaks to the skill and dexterity of women in particular, which they develop through domestic duties. The passage therefore foregrounds the many ways in which women are underestimated: Their domestic work is unappreciated and unseen, but it lends them special skills, which can be wielded for deadly purposes. 

“MRS. HALE: It’s a log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn’t it? I wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it?...

SHERIFF: They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it. (The men laugh, the women look abashed.)” 

This quotation showcases the play’s dramatic irony. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are on the cusp of discovering the key piece of evidence for which the men are hunting. Yet Henry insists on interrupting their conversation with a sarcastic and derisive jibe about quilting—which he perceives as a trifling and frivolous affair. Ironically, the idea of a knot, which is what was required to secure the rope around Mr. Wright’s neck, is dismissed as a women’s trifle. This highlights the way men’s sexism blinds them to what is right in front of them if only they would take the skills, capabilities, and suffering of women at face value. 

“MRS. PETERS: Oh—I don’t know. I don’t know as she was nervous. I sometimes sew awful queer when I’m just tired.” 

This quotation quietly and subtly highlights the shared struggle of women. The women possess intimate knowledge of each other’s lives simply by being women. The common struggle of doing a domestic duty poorly due to sheer exhaustion is something habitually overlooked by men, who see women's work as inconsequential, unskilled, and easy. Nevertheless, the women know that their work takes skill and strength.  

“MRS HALE: I could’ve come. I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful—and that’s why I ought to have come. I—I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road. I dunno what it is, but it’s a lonesome place and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now—(shakes her head).” 

Mrs. Hale laments what she perceives as a failure to come to a fellow woman’s aid. She feels that it was her responsibility to help make Mrs. Wright’s life more bearable due simply to their shared experience as women and Mrs. Hale’s ability to clearly see that Mrs. Wright must have been suffering—a fact which is clearly and brutally ignored by the men in the play, and by society at large. This line therefore helps to provide another motive in the play: Mrs. Hale’s motive to take up for Mrs. Wright and hide evidence from the County Attorney and Sheriff. Mrs. Hale feels guilty that she did not do anything to help Mrs. Wright, as well as feeling a general solidarity with Mrs. Wright as a woman. Both of these guide her to concealing the evidence. 

“MRS. PETERS: (In a whisper) When I was a girl—my kitten—there was a boy who took a hatchet, and before my eyes—and before I could get there—(covers her face in an instant). If they hadn’t held me back I would have—(catches herself, looks upstairs where steps are heard, falters weakly)—hurt him.” 

Mrs. Peters, who is more hesitant to participate in the cover-up, speaks to her own experience at a tender age, with the wanton and inexplicable violence of males. This quotation highlights the shared social experience of women and the empathy and compassion that arises as its result. Although Mrs. Peters is far less gung-ho about taking up for Mrs. Wright, she cannot deny nor scarcely control the emotional knowledge and resonance that the canary’s killing brings forth in her. She, too, has witnessed the recklessly cruel murder at the hands of a male of a defenseless animal she loved—and confesses that she, too, wanted to hurt the one responsible. Mrs. Wright’s plight is therefore immediately recognizable and relatable to her. 

“MRS. HALE: I might have known she needed help! I know how things can be—for women. I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s just a different kind of the same thing...If I were you, I wouldn’t tell her the fruit is gone. Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right. Take this in to prove it to her. She—she may never know whether it was broke or not.” 

In this quotation, Mrs. Hale articulates one of the central theses of the play. She asserts that she shares an inherent sisterhood and solidarity with Mrs. Wright and with all women. She speaks to the isolation common to all farmhouse wives—an isolation that paradoxically binds them to each other through shared knowledge and empathy. Moreover, she says that while each woman has a private and unique struggle, it is still also a shared, universal one: contending with the emotional violence and isolation produced by a misogynistic social order and the direct oppression of their husbands. Mrs. Hale also devises a way to bring relief to her fellow woman amid this shared struggle: to set her mind at ease about a domestic duty gone awry. Mrs. Hale is acutely aware of the injustice of criticizing a woman’s household work while simultaneously denigrating it as valueless and without skill, and of doing so without consideration for extenuating circumstances; she hopes to ease Mrs. Wright’s anxiety and shame through the fib articulated here. This is an act of emotional solidarity. 

“COUNTY ATTORNEY: (Facetiously) Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what do you call it, ladies?

MRS. HALE: (Hand against her pocket) We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson.” 

In these closing lines of the play, the recurrent motif of quilting or knotting the blanket resurfaces one final time. Throughout the play, George and Henry catch snippets of the women's conversation. They have derided the women's talk about the blanket as a useless trifle that pales in comparison to the “hard [men’s] work” they are undertaking during the investigation. Specifically, they jabbed at the women for even wondering whether Mrs. Wright was going to quilt or knot the blanket, as they see this as a useless and idiotic discussion. Mrs. Hale’s final word, that Mrs. Wright chose to knot the blanket, and her assertion that that is what the women call it, is the play’s final and most searing example of dramatic irony. The word “knot” is a double entendre, as it refers both to the actual blanket—which the men have dismissed as nothing—and the rope knotted around John Wright’s neck. Mrs. Hale is essentially speaking in a kind of code that Mrs. Peters and the audience understand; it is only the men in the scene who do not. She can freely speak this double entendre without risk of George catching on precisely because he is too invested in his own delusions about the weaknesses and inconsequentiality of women to hear the meaning of her statement.