What Does The Bird Symbolize In Trifles

People tend to stroll through life ignoring the unimportant details, as people they tend to focus on the big picture and end up missing important information along the way. Throughout life certain situations may have been able to be solved if someone would have just paid attention to a smaller seemingly trivial piece of information. Writers in literature tend to use this life error within their works in order to provide more depth or to tell unwritten parts of the story they otherwise want to remain hidden. These trifling objects or symbols tend to be overlooked and leads readers to miss out on certain parts of the story they may not obtain through a simple reading of the text. In the 1916 play, “Trifles”, the player writer exploits peoples
Hale and Mrs. Peters discover that the bird had not died of natural causes and rather that someone had wrung its neck. Finding the bird in this way indicates that the bird had been murdered by someone, while it is never directly said the play implies that Mr. Wright killed the bird. This bird dead bird symbolizes Mrs. Wright and is directly symbolic of her journey to the events that take place within the play. Mrs. Wright and the bird share many similarities from them both being trapped and both of them enjoying singing. Mrs. Hale also references the bird’s similarity to Mrs. Wright when she says “[Mrs. Wright] was kind of like a bird herself – real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and – fluttery,” (Glaspell 987) continuing later on to question what might have changed in Mrs. Wright that ruined her former glory. Just like Mrs. Wright the bird was once beautiful and alive singing a beautiful tune only for Mr. Wright to shut it down as he did to Mrs. Wright. Not only does this bird symbolize Mrs. Wright but it also gives the reader a motive as to why Mrs. Wright may have murdered her husband. Upon first glance one may have believed that Mrs. Wright had murdered her husband for absolutely no reason but upon further investigation on the bird the reader can see why the murder had taken place to begin with. The bird shows the audience that the Mr. Wright had already metaphorically murdered Mrs. Wright. Prior to Mr. Wrights murder, he had encaged his wife in a silent home without outside interaction, to pile on top of that he also took away one of the things she loved, singing. This murder committed by Mr. Wright is not physical but instead an internal murder in which Mrs. Wright lost who she