What is the setting of Trifles?

The place of Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, is a farmhouse in rural Iowa; the development of the plot occurs mainly in the kitchen.The time is the winter of 1900. 

Interestingly, Glaspell skillfully uses setting as the objective correlative for the atmosphere and the emotional conditions of the characters. T. S. Eliot describes this literary element as

...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. 

• Place Setting

In Trifles, the place setting of a cold, bitter, lifeless winter and the isolation of the farm acts as the objective correlatives of Minnie Wright's loneliness in an empty farmhouse devoid of the laughter of children and their love, distant from neighbors. As Mrs. Hale, who has a farm nearby, remarks, "We live close together and we live far apart." The Wright farm is in a hollow and it "don't see the road....It's a lonesome place and always was."

Within the kitchen, where warmth from stoves and human hearts should abide, there is a terrible chill as the fire has gone out when the county attorney, the sheriff and his wife, and a neighbor and his wife arrive. In the cupboards, jelly jars containing the fruits that Mrs. Wright grew, picked, cooked, and preserved have frozen and cracked. These frozen jars and ruined fruit correlate with the coldness of Mr. Wright's heart that has wrought this painful loneliness and suffering in Mrs. Wright. 
Also within the cupboards is the dead canary, the bird who gave voice to Minnie Wright's solitary soul, but it has been silenced by the authoritarian husband.

• Time Setting

Also acting as an objective correlative is the time setting of 1900. During this era women possessed little voice in the affairs of men, or even in their homes. Not only was their repression widespread, but they were often oppressed in their homes, victims of emotional neglect or abuse. The torn clothing of a woman who once was pert, attractively dressed, and part of the church choir, suggests Mrs. Wright's neglect as do the erratic stitches in the quilt she was making.
The evidence of this oppression convinces the women in the kitchen, the wife of the sheriff and the neighbor, that Mrs. Wright was much more a victim than the perpetrator of a crime.

Describe the setting and atmosphere in the opening scene of Trifles. Does it change throughout the play?

The one-act play Trifles by Susan Glaspell is about a murder investigation that takes place in a remote farmhouse. Mrs. Wright has been arrested and accused of strangling her husband with a length of rope. Sheriff Henry Peters, a local farmer named Lewis Hale, and the county attorney George Henderson have come to the Wright home to look for clues. Accompanying them are Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. The women remain in the kitchen while the men go about the house and grounds searching for evidence.

The entire play takes place in the kitchen of the farmhouse, which Glaspell describes in a note at the beginning. She writes immediately that the kitchen is "gloomy." Under the sink are unwashed pans, outside the breadbox sits a loaf of bread, and on the table is a dishtowel. Gloomy means dark, depressing, and melancholy. This atmosphere combined with the mess in the kitchen immediately creates feelings of tension and foreboding in the audience. There is also a stove that was lit earlier on the sheriff's instructions, a rocking chair that Mrs. Wright was sitting in when she was found, a quilt that Mrs. Wright was working on, and a broken bird cage.

The overall impression of the kitchen is that it is a sad, cheerless place from which Mrs. Wright was taken while she was in the midst of her work. The setting and atmosphere do not change during the course of the play. The room remains consistently dark and melancholy. This fits the somber task of a murder investigation and provides insight into the lonely, joyless life that Mrs. Wright lived with her abusive husband.

The bleak, cheerless atmosphere contributes to the women's insights into what really happened between Mr. and Mrs. Wright. They come to the conclusion that Mrs. Wright probably did kill her husband, but that it may have been justified because of his abusive behavior. As a result, they withhold the evidence they find from the men in an effort to protect Mrs. Wright.

Does the setting in Trifles by Susan Glaspell impact the play's theme?

The setting in Trifles is very significant. The play is set in a rural area, more specifically at an abandoned farmhouse. Being set in a rural landscape, the characters are meant to represent real people. And although this is set in America's heartland, the relatively larger distance between neighbors in rural farming areas implies a sense of loneliness that parallel's Mrs. Wright's loneliness. When Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale discuss Mrs. Wright's personality and relationship with Mr. Wright, Mrs. Hale notes that the house "never seemed a very cheerful place" and she implies that John Wright was not a pleasant man to live with: 

But I don't think a place'd be any cheerfuller for John Wright's being in it. 

With Mr. Wright dead and Mrs. Wright in custody, the farmhouse is empty and a lot of work (notably Mrs. Wright's) is left undone. Attorney Henderson condescendingly notes that Mrs. Wright must not have been a good housekeeper. Mrs. Hale, in subtle defence of Mrs. Wright, replies, "There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm." The evidence of unfinished chores, the abandoned farmhouse, and Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peter's analysis of Mrs. Wright's state of mind all help illustrate the theme of loneliness in the landscape and in Mrs. Wright's relationship with her husband. 

Like the bird in its cage, Mrs. Wright evidently felt lonely and imprisoned. Also relevant to the setting, all of the characters file into the house at the beginning of the play. It is cold out, so they rush into the house to get warm by the fire. The landscape is rural, lonely, and cold (bleak). The fact that the characters file in to get out of the cold gives a subtle indication that the area is cold (figuratively and literally) and that they are forced (trapped as Mrs. Wright was) to go inside. 

What is the context in Trifles?

There are several motifs and symbols in the playTriflesthat acquire major significance when looked in context.

Proximity- This particular motif is not in plain sight, but then you realize that males and females are consistently separated or at a far range of proximity, both physically and seemingly socially, throughout the play. The men are familiar to each other and joke around. The women maintain their distance and call each other by last names. Yet, at the obvious realization of what really happened at Minnie Wright made the woman come closer as in joining Minnie's cause.

Telephone- The party-line telephone that John Wright possessed at a great expense would have served to connect Minnie to the outside world. Ironically, she was cut off from the rest of the world and isolated against her will. She, like the phone, were symbols of John's macho need to be the alpha whom others need. The fact that John keeps Minnie isolated makes him all the more guilty of his own death. He created Minnie's inner "monster".

Stitching on the quilt/ Incomplete tasks-In "Women's Work--Trifles? The Skill and Insights of Playwright Susan Glaspell", *Smith (1982) argues

The incomplete tasks in Minnie's kitchen argue that she acted very soon after provocation, John's strangling of the bird (p.182)

Whether she snapped or not, it is clear that the pattern of provocation had seared in Minnie's brain long enough, and that the potential here is that she had switched to a survival mode of life where, at the lowest and most anxious point, she has to end the life of the predator.

The bird - Throughout history, the arts have always given birds a semi-ethereal role where they serve as messengers, carriers, or even the very essence of innocence. Similarly, the bird being killed is synonymous with John literally killing the last drop of innocence in her soul, and also literally, making her guilty of murder (regardless of the circumstances). Therefore, all that had to happen was for John to commit one more act, abuse Minnie one more time, or try one more act of power, for Minnie to finally take control in one way or another.

Along with these contextual indicators of meaning, the pun in the title "Trifles" serves as an ironic fact: all of these elements mentioned could have helped the county attorney to build his case. Yet, the prevalent feeling that women are second class citizens, and that their attention to details is a waste of time is precisely what leads the case to go awry. All the women have to do is hide the key evidence, those very "trifles", and save Minnie Wright.

*Source: Smith, Beverly A. "Women's Work--Trifles? The Skill and Insights of Playwright Susan Glaspell." International Journal of Women's Studies 5 (March 1982): 172-84.