Gender And Gender Roles In Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Gender and gender roles play a center role in Trifles as they dictate how the characters behave, emphasizing the differences between men and women in this time period. The men are labeled as the workers/investigators who are dominant in this society while the women are subordinate/lower status individuals that are confined to the home and feminine concerns. Mr. Hale even claims that he “didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much of a difference…” when referring to Mr. and Mrs. Wright (1108 Trifles). Mr. Hale is blatantly stating that a woman’s opinion and practically all women as individuals do not matter in this male dominated society. As a result, the men are overly arrogant and believe that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are too fixated on
Wright being the murder as well as why she committed such an atrocity. The women find three clues as to why Mrs. Wright killed her husband. The first being the quilt with the poor knotting indicating Mrs. Wright’s nervousness of being found guilty of her crime. Next is the broken birdcage, and finally the dead bird that show the motive Mrs. Wright had for murdering her husband as he had practically killed her last source of happiness (the bird). The women now understand what happened and why it happened regarding the murder, but instead of rushing to their bigot husbands to tell them the truth, they take and even alter the evidence to protect Mrs. Wright. Through the whole twisted ordeal, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters begin to recognize and acknowledge the pain and strife Mrs. Wright has been forced to go through with her husband and even being to relate her struggles to their own considering women “all go through the same things – it’s all just a different kind of the same thing” (1116). In Mrs. Wright’s strangled bird, the women begin to connect their own strangled lives, but they understand it is impossible for them two alone to change society. In an act of defiance, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters quietly rebel against the patriarchy by seizing the evidence. The men, lost in their own egos and self-absorbed natures, are clueless to the fact that these women are apprehending all of the evidence as they believe the women are taking trifles back to Mrs. Wright to make her feel more comfortable during her time in prison. The country attorney even states that “Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law” (1117). The attorney fails to see that Mrs. Peters, as are all the other women, is her own person and not some object that a man is married