Trifles

Susan Glaspell’s 1916 play was later rewritten as a short story, “A Jury of Her Peers.” Part detective story, part realistic drama, part feminist critique, the story raises serious ethical issues about domestic abuse, justifiable homicide, mental illness as a criminal defense, the withholding of evidence, and the protection of a murderer, not to mention male supremacy.

In an isolated farmhouse, John Wright is found dead, having been strangled to death in his bed with a rope. The only other person present at the scene is his wife, Minnie. The sheriff, county attorney, and the neighbor who discovered the crime search the farmhouse for evidence to confirm that Minnie murdered her husband. The wives of the sheriff and the neighbor are brought along to gather personal belongings to take to Minnie in jail.

The men overhear the women discussing Minnie’s domestic items, including her sewing project, wondering if she was going to “quilt it or knot it.” They mock the women for concerning themselves with “trifles” at a murder scene and fail to search the kitchen, which they dismiss as too unimportant a part of the house to contain any evidence.

While they search more important sites, like the barn, the women discover evidence in the kitchen that enables them to piece together a theory of how Minnie’s cold and heartless husband killed (by strangulation) her beloved pet songbird, causing Minnie to become unhinged.

Knowing Minnie’s history of loneliness in a loveless marriage with a cold, distant, possibly abusive husband, the women struggle over revealing the evidence to the men. In the end they conceal it, even as the men continue to dismiss their concern with “trifles.”

The story effectively exposes male superiority and prejudice against women and the domestic sphere as self-defeating bigotry. Yet it also appears to some readers to condone, not only the concealing of evidence, but also the commission of murder. By creating sympathy for Minnie and the women friends who understand her plight, does Glaspell also create sympathy for their actions, murder and the cover-up of murder?

Do Minnie’s friends have sufficient evidence that John Wright was abusive? That Minnie was “temporarily insane” and/or morally justified in taking her husband’s life? Can we be sure that John Wright killed the bird? Even if he did, does the killing of a bird justify the killing of a person? Or was the killing of the bird merely the last straw in a long marital history of cruelty that finally broke the camel’s back of Minnie’s mental health?

Given the textual evidence of the story, it is hard to imagine Minnie would not be convicted of the crime. There is no evidence of forced entry or of anyone else being in the house at the time of the murder. The manner of death would have ruled out suicide. Minnie clearly had the means and the opportunity. What is not clear is motive, and the women conceal the evidence for that.

However, it could be argued, they are also concealing evidence of John’s cruelty and Minnie’s mental instability, which could conceivably have been used in her defense. Perhaps this is splitting hairs. The story clearly creates sympathy for the murderer and the women who protect her.

So, our judgment may rest with whether we agree with the theory the women concoct based on their observations and whether, based on this theory, we agree the murder was either a justifiable homicide or a case of “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

If we disagree with that theory and that conclusion, then we might find the story to be morally disturbing, though it is worth asking if sympathy with a criminal equates with condoning their crime (see next blog post).

In any case, if we dwell on these questions, we may overlook what is, perhaps, the main point of the story—that the men who dismiss women’s work and women’s sphere as “trifles” make colossal fools of themselves in their efforts to build a complete criminal case.