What does the bird represent in Trifles?
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 conversation between her neighbor and the the attorney's wife, the reader comes to realize just how much like the bird Minnie Wright is. Apparently Minnie Foster, as a young woman, was a beautiful, social, friendly young woman who enjoyed singing in the church. Everyone commented on her beautiful singing voice. Her energy seemed to be as unrestrained as the flight of a bird.
Even though Minnie Wright bought the bird herself, it certainly symbolizes these parallels. The bird is the one spot of beauty in Minnie's life. It is the one pretty sound in the too-silent home. Mr. Wright's killing of the bird thus symbolizes Minnie Foster's "death" as she becomes Minnie Wright.
Much...
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like Mr. Wright could not stand to see his wife so vibrant, he hated the bird as well. Finding the dead canary in Minnie's sewing kit provides the women the reason that Minnie had supposedly killed her husband. He had metaphorically killed her first.
What is the symbolic significance of the bird in the play Trifles?
The discovery of the empty bird cage in a cupboard and, after that, the dead bird in the sewing box in a room that contains what the men think are trifling "kitchen things," is, ironically, crucial to uncovering the motive of the murder of Mr. Wright and evoking the sympathetic tone in the conversation of the women. Thus, the poor little bird with its broken neck becomes symbolic of the forlorn Mrs. Wright, whose mentally abusive husband objects to the little songbird's melodies and silences it just as he has silenced her singing and happiness. Like the empty cage, Mrs. Wright's life has become devoid of beauty and contentment; instead, it is a discord of broken jars and erratic stitching on mere pieces of quilting.
The dead canary is the final piece in the puzzle of the women's minds. For, as they realize its neck has been wrung by Mr. Wright, the women look at each other with "growing comprehension [and] horror." For, Mr. Wright has been murdered by having a rope tied around his neck in imitation of the bird's death. With comprehension of the desperation in Mrs. Wright's life, Mrs. Hale remarks to Mrs. Peters,
"We all go through the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing."
After wiping her eyes, with an empathetic gesture, Mrs. Hale slips the sewing box under the quilt pieces when she hears the men so that they do not find the motive which will convict Mrs. Wright.