Trifles

In the play Trifles, Minnie actually kills her husband because he killed her bird. The bird, a canary, meant everything to Minnie, so when her husband broke its neck, she got mad and in a fit of...

Trifles is a one-act play that concerns the murder of Mr. Wright, an abusive husband who was killed by his wife. The characters of the story intend to piece together the events that led up to the...

Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles examines how men and women communicate with each other. Men are often oblivious to what women are trying to communicate because they consider themselves...

In Susan Glaspell's play Trifles, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover several significant pieces of evidence, which establish Mrs. Wright's motive to kill her husband. While the men are searching...

Sherlock Holmes remarked several times that his method was founded upon the observation of trifles, from which he was able to deduce matters of great importance. This is a convincing description of...

The women piece together what happened by looking at the trifles in the kitchen that the male police officers disparage. They know that Minnie Wright killed her husband John Wright. First, they...

In the stage directions, Mrs. Hale is introduced as a larger woman than Mrs. Peters and one who "would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking," were it not for the fact that she is looking...

The play, Trifles, and the short story,"A Jury of Her Peers," both by Susan Glaspell, are the same story told through a different medium. As such, there is little variation between them. The...

The play "Trifles" takes place in the dirty, chaotic kitchen of Mrs. Minnie Wright one cold winter day. The sheriff, the attorney, and a neighbor come to the house to investigate the death of Mr....

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are physically contrasted in the stage directions at the beginning of the play. Mrs. Hale is larger and, ordinarily, more comfortable looking, whereas Mrs. Peters is...

The little canary is a trifle whose significance is only known by the women because they do not share its discovery with the men. In a sense, the canary symbolizes Mrs. Wright (the former Minnie...

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters do not exactly conceal the evidence. They simply do not bring it to the attention of the men. They do this because they feel the killing of Mr. Wright was justified. There...

The idea that Mrs. Wright was going to knot her quilt rather than sew it comes up over and over in the play, pointing to its importance. When a person knots a quilt, he or she uses fewer stitches,...

An important literary device used in the play is foregrounding. Glaspell focuses centrally on what would normally be marginalized characters in a murder mystery: the wives of the detectives. Rather...

There is not too much time for a character to change and develop over this short a play. However, as Mrs. Peters becomes more aware of the circumstances of Minnie Wright's life, her sense of...

Trifles is a play of considerable nuance and it would be foolish to try to extract a single message or moral from it. One of its many meanings, however, is the idea that unquestioned dominance...

The one-act play Trifles by Susan Glaspell concerns a murder investigation after the death of John Wright, a local farmer. Wright's wife Minnie has been arrested for the murder. The investigation...

Though she is never seen in the play, Minnie Wright is the primary focus of the narrative. By the beginning of the action, the characters are exploring the now empty home of Minnie and her husband,...

In the one-act play by Susan Glaspell, Trifles, we find the characters of Mrs. Hale and Mrs Peters collecting items that Minnie Wright has requested from her jail cell, where she is held in...

While the men conduct their investigation of the Wright property, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters remain in the kitchen, where Mrs. Wright spent the majority of her time, and begin to notice small...

The bird is important because it provides a possible motive for the murder of Mr. Wright. When the women find the bird, with its neck broken, wrapped in a piece of silk in the sewing box, they...

In Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, Mrs. Minnie Wright has been accused of murdering her husband as he slept. A group of men and a pair of women arrive at the beginning of the play, entering the...

A big theme in "Trifles" is the illustration of traditional gender roles. The men in the play display personalities of purpose and analytical skills in conducting their investigation. The men...

The conflict that seems to be most evident in the play Trifles is the abrogation of the basic rights for safety and liberty, that all females deserve, by a male-dominated society. The tendency to...

In Susan Glaspell’s play, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters accompany their husbands to the Wright household. They proceed to look for clues that reveal Mrs. Wright's motive for killing her husband....

It is a dead canary that Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale find in Mrs. Wright’s sewing box. Their “growing comprehension of horror” is due to the fact that in this moment, they realized exactly why Mrs....

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters decide not to reveal the evidence they find that implicates Mrs. Wright in the murder of her husband. The main clue they uncover is Mrs. Wright's dead bird, which is in...

After she looks around the stark house of the Wrights, becoming disturbed by the worn and shabby clothes of Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Hale experiences guilt for not having visited Minnie Foster. For, she...

The title of Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, is a meaningful clue to the reason that the men do not find the evidence of Mrs. Wright's having killed her husband. For, it is the small, apparently...

Before marriage, Mrs. Hale says that Mrs. Wright—when she was still Minnie Foster—"used to wear pretty clothes and be lively." She was "one of the town girls singing in the choir," but this was...

Out of the many themes that this story expands upon, the most salient is gender inequality. A lot of topics surface under the umbrella of this theme. Among many other subthemes that exist within...

Well, given your choices, I would answer that the bird in Trifles represents Mrs. Wright. Minnie is a beautiful caged bird in her marriage to the dark and unforgiving Mr. Wright. Through the...

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows what characters in a play do not. What the audience of Trifles learns, along with wives exploring Mrs. Wright's kitchen, is the reason why Mrs. Wright...

To build off of the previous answer, Susan Glaspell does not use a lot of figurative language within her one-act play, Trifles. This is because she so precisely uses one moment of figurative...

In the written text of a play, dialogue is the lines that the characters speak, while the author’s stage directions may provide background, describe the set, flesh out characterization, indicate...

There is verbal irony first of all in the title of the play. Practically all clues appear trifling (Sherlock Holmes famously told Watson that his method was founded on the observation of trifles)....

In the one-act play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, a group of people come to a remote farmhouse to investigate the murder of John Wright, the owner of the farm. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is being held as...

The suspect of the murder of her husband, Mrs. Wright seems to have greatly changed from her youth thirty years ago in which she has been described by Mrs. Hale as "...one of the town girls singing...

This statement, from which the play derives its title, is ironic because the resolution of the murder depends entirely on those "trifles." For all their bluster, the men are mostly clueless as to...

The setting of Trifles is crucial to helping the audience understand Minnie Wright’s life and the reason she behaved as she did. In general terms, the characters state that the Wright farm was in...

When the county attorney puts his hand on the shelf of Mrs. Wright's cupboard, he finds that the shelf is sticky. Mrs. Peters comments that Mrs. Wright's preserve jars have broken because they...

The kitchen in Glaspell's Trifles has a specific significance as the setting for the play. Minnie Wright is accused of murdering her husband in his sleep. When officials come to look for evidence,...

Minnie Wright is kept offstage because she functions more as a thematic centerpiece of the play than a dynamic character. We do not need to know anything about her individual personality and...

Another aspect to Mr. Hale stopping in on the Wrights is that he hoped by talking about the party line in front of Mrs. Wright, John Wright would change his mind, though he notes, "I didn't know as...

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are two women who are basically acquaintances and who are united in this play by their husbands. The men are investigating a crime scene: Mr. Wright has been murdered and...

The one-act play Trifles by Susan Glaspell takes place in the kitchen of a remote farmhouse, where the dead body of a farmer named John Wright has been discovered. His wife, Minnie Wright, has been...

The telephone symbolizes a line of communication and a catalyst for human companionship. The phone also symbolizes freedom, because it would allow Mrs. Wright to escape her home, if only through...

Susan Glaspell's one-act play, Trifles, was first performed in 1916 and was based on a murder that took place in 1900. Society has changed tremendously in that time, and the attitudes depicted in...

These are women married to men who represent the power of society, and the control of sporadic situation. Moreover, the women, as their wives, are paradoxically meant to represent the exact...

There are several clues that the women use to piece together Mrs. Wright's motive for murdering her husband. These are all found either in the kitchen or in the adjacent room. First, they notice...