In Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles,
Mrs. Wright has been taken into custody, suspected of killing her husband as he
slept.
Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale come with the sheriff and
other men who are looking for evidence; the women will gather some of Mrs. Wright's
things to take to her.
The men move through the house and
make comments about Mrs. Wright's housekeeping, showing their ignorance of what a
woman's life is really like: it is hard to keep a house and clean towels when a husband
tracks in dirt; that putting up jelly is hard work and losing the jars from freezing
would upset her for the time and effort lost. The men dismiss these things as
"trifles."
Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters take exception to the
comments: they, too, work hard with little recognition for their labors. Knowing of Mrs.
Wright before she married, of her love of singing and sweet disposition, they wonder
what changed her:
MRS. HALE. She--come to think of it, she was kind
of like a bird herself--real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and--fluttery.
How--she--did--change.
The
women notice her cheerless home: no children to bring life to it; living with a hard man
could have crushed the spirit of Minnie Wright.
MRS. HALE. ...Wright [was] out to work all day,
and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs.
Peters?
MRS. PETERS. Not to know him; I've seen him in
town. They say he was a good man.
MRS. HALE. Yes--good; he
didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was
a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him.
(Shivers.) Like a raw wind that gets to the
bone.
As the the ladies
continue through the house, they note the cold, the broken jelly jars that would upset
any woman, and then they find a bird cage in the cupboard. The door
is broken, hanging at an odd angle, and the cage seems to have been "roughed up." The
women discuss the presence of a bird: Mrs. Hale had not known Mrs. Wright to have a
bird, but remembered a man who had come through town the year before selling cheap
canaries. They agree that the presence of the bird would have cheered Mrs. Wright and
improved the dark atmosphere of her home. They assume a cat got it...except for the
broken up cage...
Mrs. Hale suggests that Mrs. Peters
gather the quilt Mrs. Wright has been working on. In her sewing basket, along for
quilting pieces, Mrs. Hale finds a fancy box; thinking scissors might be stored there,
she opens it and finds something wrapped inside a piece of silk—an expensive kind of
cloth. Opening it, they find the dead bird, with its head at an old angle—as if the neck
had been broken: "somebody wrung its neck."
The women begin
to speculate as to what happened. Mrs. Hale is sure Mr. Wright did it out of pure
meanness. Mrs. Peters recalls being a little girl and how she felt when another boy
killed a kitten:
When I was a girl--my kitten--there was a boy
took a hatchet, and before my eyes--and before I could get there--(Covers her
face an instant.) If they hadn't held me back, I would
have-- (Catches herself, looks upstairs, where steps are heard, falters
weakly.)--hurt
him.
Suddenly the women can
guess what happened. The death of the bird must have driven Minnie over the edge. When
the men return, the women hide the bird in silence. They will not provide damning
evidence—instead they protect Mrs. Wright in a move of
solidarity...against men who could not possibly understand the hardships a woman faces
in the world.
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