trifles Journal# 7

This play relates that Susan Glaspell, a reporter, based her one-act play "Trifles" on events that actually happened in Iowa near the turn of the 20th century, which she covered. The author points out that the plot of the play is as if Glaspell didn't like the outcome of the real-life situation and then got to craft her own ending. The paper relates that the themes in "Trifles “are gender relationships, the tug-of-war battles between the sexes, women's perceptive intuition vs. men's bullishness, male chauvinism and the good-old-boy network of criminal justice . After leaving newspaper work, her writing was strictly fictional; until that is her husband, George Cram Cook (a classics scholar with whom she had been involved during his second marriage in a long affair) urged her to write a play. "Glaspell may have been trying to buoy up Cook's artistic reputation by making him out to be the party responsible" for her literary success, something he, Cook, had never achieved. Meanwhile, even though Glaspell herself carried on an affair with a married man, thus hurting another woman, she painted men in "Trifles" as the bad guys." We know the play was based on an actual trial Susan Glaspell covered as a reporter in Des Moines. In this sense, the play was written for a Midwestern audience to dramatize the terrible life of a farm wife, isolated and dependent on her husband for her physical and emotional needs, with the occasional tragic consequences the play depicts. But the play was written after Susan Glaspell had left the Midwest, after she had lived abroad, married, and moved to Provincetown. She had time to ponder the implications of the event and see the tragedy in larger terms, so she was able to transform a journalistic story into a universal drama. One idea of feminist criticism is that literature is based on women’s experience, and ?it is specifically the connective, the accumulative details of experience, that provide the structural key for the comprehension of this story (Alkalay-Gut 1).? Upon entering her home, Mrs. Hale notices that Mrs. Wright left certain things undone, such as dirty dishes in the sink, the half-wiped table, and the half-poured sugar. Being a farmer’s wife herself she understands this, and defends Mrs. Wright when the men criticize her untidiness by replying, .There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm. She understands what it’s like to have a million things to do and not enough time to do them. Women often make the job look so easy that men like these believe there isn’t much to it. She also knows that these men do not appreciate the effort put forth to manage a household, but more importantly she speaks her mind, asserting her views firmly.