Plot Structure in Susan Glaspell's Trifles
The play "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell is a whodunit type of murder mystery. But in this case, the "professionals," whose job it is to find out what happened, failed in their task. The County Attorney (Mr. Henderson) and the Sheriff (Mr. Peters) attempt to piece together what had transpired on the day when John Wright was murdered. They interviewed Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mr. Hale who told them that Mrs. Wright, John's wife, had been acting strange when he had found her in the kitchen. After taking in all of this information, they left Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale in the kitchen.
Instead of focusing on the men and their quest to solve the case, Glaspell concentrates on the women in the kitchen. It is at this point, when the men leave the kitchen and go upstairs, that the women begin to, perhaps inadvertently, find out for themselves who had killed John Wright. I believe the rising action of this play begins when the men leave the women alone in the kitchen. Without even knowing it, the women are using the tactics that a trained detective would use: asking many questions and making inferences. They engage in small talk and comment on how the kitchen was left after the murder. For example, when Mrs. Peters was looking through the cupboard, she discovered that Mrs. Wright had a bread set. Mrs. Hale then concludes that "she was going to put this in here," referring to a loaf of bread beside the breadbox. Another example is when Mrs. Peters noticed that Mrs. Wright had been "piecing a quilt." As the two women are wondering whether she was going to "quilt it or knot it," the men come down the stairs and overhear them. The Sheriff repeats out loud what he had heard them say and the men all laugh, obviously making fun of the women. This situation is interesting because the men have no idea that the women were actually making valuable conclusions. I think the next line that Mrs. Hale says is very important:
"I don't know as there's anything so strange, our takin' up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence. I don't see as it's anything to laugh about."
This line shows that even the women themselves believe that they are not finding anything of importance. The "little things" or "Trifles" in the kitchen are considered unimportant to the solving of the case to both the men and the women.
The rising action continues through a series of small discoveries such as the "nervous" sewing patterns that Mrs. Wright had stitched and the broken door on the birdcage. Right after finding the broken door on the canary cage, Mrs. Hale said, "I wish if they're going to find any evidence they'd be about it." They both had no idea that they had just found a key piece of evidence. The next discovery that they made signifies the climax of the play: A box in the sewing basket contained the dead bird, which had its neck wrung. This single find immediately gave an answer to the previous discoveries they had made. Glaspell's description sums it all up: "Their eyes meet. A look of growing comprehension, of horror". The "growing comprehension" means that in a matter of seconds after finding the dead bird, they completely understand what had happened and all questions that they had posed earlier were answered. The women were terrified and in a state of disbelief about the truth they had just discovered.
Without even trying to do so they had found the murderer of John Wright, his wife. The scene of the murder replayed in their minds: Mrs. Wright had been sewing in the kitchen, when Mr. Wright, who hated birds, came into the kitchen. This explains the nervous sewing by Mrs. Wright who didn't want the bird to be discovered. But he found the cage with the bird hidden in one of the cupboards, broke the door open and wrung its neck. This was enough motive for Mrs. Wright to kill her husband. Right after their horrific discovery, they heard the men coming in the house and Mrs. Hale hid the bird in the sewing basket. This I believe is the resolution. The women had made up their minds that they were not going to reveal to the men what they had found. Even when the County Attorney asked them where the bird was after he saw the cage, they lied and told him, "We think the cat got it."
They knew what type of man Mr. Wright was and that he wouldn't have liked a bird to be in the house. Mrs. Hale said he was a "hard man" and "just to pass the time of day with him was like a raw wind that gets to the bone." With this type of personality, he would not have liked a bird in the house, and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale both believed that he would have killed the bird as a way of getting rid of it. The ladies did not want to reveal their findings to the men because they were sympathetic towards Mrs. Wright who had bought the bird to have something that actually was happy around the house and would be there for her all the time. As the reader, I also felt the same sympathy for Mrs. Wright who had to endure her husband's abnormal personality. All she wanted was a companion and when her husband took it away from her, she decided that she was going to kill him. I don't agree with her decision to kill him, but she was probably pushed to the point where she couldn't control her actions.
Nevertheless, the motive that the Attorney and Sheriff had been desperately seeking was only going to be found if the women revealed their discovery or if the men found the bird. The remainder of the play is very tense and represents the falling action. The men return from another search of the second floor and enter the kitchen. The Attorney approaches the table where the women are seated and says, "It's all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it . . . If there was something to show - something to make a story about..." The women still do not tell and are extremely nervous about the dead bird in the sewing basket underneath the quilt pieces being discovered. The most tense part of this scene is when the Sheriff asks, "Do you want to see what Mrs. Peters is going to take in?" The Attorney moves a few things around in the basket and for a moment I believed he was going to find the bird, but then he said, "I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies picked out . . . A sheriff's wife is married to the law." This last line insinuates to the women that they are indeed breaking the law by not telling the Attorney about the bird. Even though the men have no idea that the bird even exists, I believe the women feel guilty about not revealing their find but I also think that their sympathy for Mrs. Wright outweighs that guilt.
The Unheimlich in Susan Glaspell's Play Trifles: A Feminist Interpretation of Freud's Uncanny
by Juliette Tang
Although published three years before Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles" is a literary embodiment of Freudian techniques. The dramatic tension in "Trifles" is marked by an acute sense of the unheimlich, or uncanny, which Freud defines as: "uneasy, eerie, blood-curdling... everything that is unheimlich ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." In this play, the three principle female characters -- Mrs. Peters, Mrs. Wright, and Mrs. Hale -- can be understood as personifications of Freud's ego, id, and superego. The symbolic unconscious appears in the text as the absent Minnie Wright, whose enigmatic presence is ingeniously presented as a lack of presence, as something not yet manifest. The unheimlich makes itself felt through Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter's eventual realization that they are deeply resentful of men and, from their anger, capable of justifying murder. Their realization coincides with the ego's realization of the repressed id, which creates an atmosphere of the uncanny in the text. "Trifles" is the story of women; it paints a picture of the female condition seen through female consciousness. The mind of Glaspell's play, its ego, superego, and id, belong to women, and men are intentionally excluded from understanding its metaphoric language. The text of the play and the events that unfold can be seen as emblematic of the linguistic system of the female mind.
The character of Mrs. Peters functions as the play's symbolic ego. She is highly self-conscious, cautious to a fault because she distrusts herself, nervous, hesitant, and, until the end of the play, consistently uncertain. She wavers between defending Minnie Wright and defending the patriarchal law, appearing to have no concept of what she desires and no stable conscience or conviction when it comes to Minnie Wright. When Mrs. Hale asks if she believes Minnie Wright killed her husband, Mrs. Peters answers in a frightened voice, "Oh, I don't know" (40). Mrs. Hale, however, is quick to judge: "Well, I don't think she did. Asking for her apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit" (40). Mrs. Hale can be interpreted as the play's superego. She is ruled by her principles and convictions and, throughout the play, often speaks of her conscience. Reflecting on Minnie Wright, Mrs. Hale says mournfully, "I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here... I stayed away because it weren't cheerful -- and that's why I ought to have come" (42). Later on in the play, Mrs. Hale cries, "Oh I wish I'd come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that" (44)? As the play's symbolic superego, Mrs. Hale is also speaks directly to Mrs. Peters and urges her to think with a conscience: "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 all just a different kind of the same thing" (44).
When the ego uncovers the unheimlich in the id, the uncanny is realized. It is the moment when the unconscious elements surface and materialize into a form recognizable to the individual consciousness. In "Trifles," the unheimlich is uncovered when Mrs. Peters, the play's ego, decides that Mr. Wright's murder is acceptable. Her dawning realization comes after she finds the dead canary, Minnie's cathexis, and recognizes the shape of Minnie's anger: "When I was a girl -- my kitten -- there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes -- and before I could get there... If they hadn't held me back I would have... hurt him" (43). Transference is at work here; through self-reference, the character Minnie becomes comprehendible. Freud postulates that this sense of doubleness or duality is inherent in the uncanny and describes it as "transferring mental processes from the one person to the other... so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other... so his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own -- in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self." The uncanny appears when the ego recognizes aspects of the id that it never knew existed. The concept of recognition is significant, because it implies pre-established acquaintance and a certain level of inherence. Glaspell implies that all women share anger at their male oppressors, and if carried to an extreme, all women are capable of sharing Minnie's murderous rage.
"Trifles" comes from Mr. Hale's line, "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles" (38). It is a feminist play about men's unwillingness to understand the female condition; it is about how women are disenfranchised, dismissed, and displaced by men in the social order. This calls to mind the Freudian notion of "penis envy." According to Freud, women enter the Oedipal phase when they discover their lack of a penis and blame the mother, turning to the father as a love object. However, far from supporting this notion of penis envy, Glaspell's play denies it completely. According to Glaspell, men fear the power of women, to an extent that they constantly belittle their female counterparts to assure themselves of their own domination. Instead of blaming other women for their lack of a penis, the women in "Trifles" bond over shared femininity. When Mr. Henderson demeans Minnie Wright by proclaiming that she is a poor housekeeper, Mrs. Hale defends her by saying, "Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be" (38). The blame is transferred from the woman to the man; it is not her dirty towels that are to be blamed, but rather his dirty hands.
The play's linguistic metonymy is based on the world of women. The central metaphors of the play -- the preserves, the birdcage, the quilt, and the knot -- all inhabit a world that men derogate, but in "Trifles" these are the only objects that speak the truth. By examining these objects, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters solve the mystery of Mr. Wright's death and protect Minnie Wright by keeping their knowledge secret, which simultaneously empowers their femininity and diminishes patriarchic control. The women become the ones with the power to exclude. Withholding their knowledge of the crime from the men is, in a sense, castration, because it renders them impotent to connect Minnie Wright to the murder of her husband. "Trifles" as a whole is uncanny, because it speaks for the minds of women, and assumes in Mrs. Hale's line, "We all go through the same things" that all women have repress the same things, that all women -- even if they do not realize it -- harbor the same dangerous resentment at their male oppressors (44). The play closes when Mr. Henderson asks the women jokingly if they think Mrs. Wright intended to sew or knot her unfinished quilt. Mrs. Hale's sarcastic reply sums up in a sentence the doubleness, the uncanny, of this feminine language: "We call it -- knot it, Mr. Henderson" (45). The castrating power of female withholding, the knot, the reference to the void, is the foundation of the play's unheimlich.
Works Cited
Bigsby, C. W. E., Ed. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
