24 pages • 48 minutes read
Susan GlaspellTrifles
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mrs. Wright’s unfinished quilt
The quilt—and the question of whether Mrs. Wright meant to quilt or knot it—is a recurring symbol and motif in the play. This is significant because the quilt exemplifies the “ladies' things” that the men are accustomed to dismissing as trifles. However, the quilt proves pivotal to the case the men are trying to solve, as it leads the women to discover the corpse of the canary. If the men had paid closer attention to this that they deemed a trifle, and to the women's conversation about it, they may have found their quarry after all. As Glaspell has written it though, the men do not. Through this motif, Glaspell therefore asserts that women, their lives, and the possessions they create as housewives, all deserve proper respect and attention—lest men fall into traps they create for themselves through their own misogynistic ignorance, while women remain unseen, unappreciated, and underestimated. Through the unfinished quilt, Glaspell enjoins the reader to pay closer attention to what lies right in front of their faces: from the rampant oppression of women, to the secrets and lives that their possessions bespeak.
The dead canary
The dead canary symbolizes Mrs. Wright’s own life and suffering, and therefore also symbolizes the plight of women on the whole. Glaspell purposely has Mrs. Hale recite lines about the way she remembered how Mrs. Wright used to sing and how she used to be young, lively and pretty—much like the dead bird. However, Mr. Wright took away the bird’s voice and life, which is symbolic of the way he robbed his wife of her own joy, youth, and former identity.
Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters also use the dead canary to break open the case—further concretizing Glaspell’s assertion about the unspoken camaraderie, fellowship, and solidarity formed among women: It is the women—not the men—who discover the canary and through their deep insights into the violence of men, they quickly piece together the mystery of the murder. That they are able to do this based upon a small, vulnerable creature unjustly robbed of by a man its life and autonomy directly symbolizes their own plight. They instantaneously recognize both Mrs. Wright and themselves in this small victim of injustice.
Mrs. Minnie Wright
Although Mrs. Minnie Wright is technically a character, she never actually appears during the play, which renders her absence within the play a motif. Glaspell purposefully chooses to keep Mrs. Wright’s physical presence from the play, which produces a number of interesting effects. For one, the real-life person of Margaret Hassock, by whom the play was inspired, is protected from dramatic interpretation and sensationalism through the absence of a figure that directly represents her. Secondly, the character’s physical absence dramatizes and concretizes the societal dismissal of women: Although the entire play would have no action without Mrs. Wright, she is markedly absent and thereby voiceless. Alternatively, Mrs. Wright’s absence can be seen not only of evidence of the erasure of her humanity, but also as a sly nod to the unrecognized power, strength, and malice of women who are habitually dismissed as weak, fragile, and trifling.
Related Titles
By Susan Glaspell
