Preview

What Is The Motive Behind Susan Glaspell's Trifles?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
297 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is The Motive Behind Susan Glaspell's Trifles?
In “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, the obvious murderer of Mr. Wright is Mrs. Wright. It wasn’t difficult to figure out this because Mrs. Wright was acting suspicious when questioned by the sheriff and county attorney Hale. She seemed entirely calm for a person who had just lost their husband. The motive behind Mrs. Wright killing her husband is unsure, but whatever it is it took Mrs. Wright over the edge. However, one reason n for Mrs. Wright to kill her husband could be because of domestic abuse. Its roots lie in that of physical and emotional trauma that Mrs. Wright endured with being married to Mr. Wright. I would assume that when Mr. Wright killed one of Mrs. Wright canaries that was a breaking point for his wife, she was vulnerable and mad.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Triffles is a play in which Mr. Hale and Sherriff Peters are investigating the cause of death of John Wright. Wright appears to have been strangled with a rope and the first suspect in the crime is his wife, Mrs. Wright. In the presence of Mrs. Wight’s friends, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, the two men begin searching for leads to the cause of the murder. The two women are fascinated by female stuff in the house and are especially attracted to Mrs. Wright’s unfinished quilt “pulling a knot and ripping the sewing”. They did not know that the knot was the evidence of the crime. On noticing the dead pet canary, the two women unravel the events that unfolded before the death of Mr. Wright. They successfully hide the dead bird and its cage “in Mrs. Hale’s pocket in her big coat” from the male investigators which led to Mrs. Wright escaping justice.…

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Phase 4 Ip

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The play “Trifles” is a murder mystery about from 1916. The husband was found strangled by a rope in his bed and his wife was found rocking in a chair. When the authorities came to inspect the property they brought some neighbors of the wife to bring her something from the house. The most compelling part was when they found the bird also strangled and hid this information from the authorities almost to protect her.…

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analysis This is a psychiatric report on Trina after she and Mcteague won the lottery and gained a place in society. There was definitely a mental change in Trina after she wins the money. She goes from a sweet innocent young lady to a crazed societal zombie. All of this was attributed to the pressure that societal standards put on her. This can be seen from the very beginning of the novel.…

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Trifles” is a classic feminist play about two women’s secret discovery of a woman murdering her husband. “A Jury of her Peers” is another edition of this story. During the 1830’s, the “Temperance Movement” which was the very first American reform campaign to emphasize the brutality of domestic violence. Insisting that domestic violence was the direct influence of alcohol the reformers believed that survival of the alcoholic’s wife was dependent on her rights to control her own earnings, gain custody of her children, and to seek a divorce on her own and none of these were options at that time for most women.…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The short story really portrays the society we live in. You hear every day about domestic violence that results in someone getting hurt or killed. The story tells about a young man involved with a woman separated from her jealous husband that results in the young man’s death. The parents of the young man play a big role in the story as well.…

    • 1588 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    As her mother waits outside the bathroom door, Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed Bone, is being beaten by her step-father, Glen. She looks into his menacing features and thinks, “it was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just me, the fact of my life. Who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil” (Allison 110). Bone, the main character in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, comes to this irrational, self-deprecating conclusion as she is being abused one day and blames not her abuser, but her mere existence instead. However, it is Glen’s own insecurities that makes him resort to the physical violence aimed towards his step-daughter. This violence reinforces Bone’s self-blame and thus creates a never-ending vicious cycle as Glen…

    • 1979 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Now the mood in these stories are very different. While Trifles has a very sad and depressed mood, Jury of her Peers has a curious and empathy type of mood. Trifles speaks on how bad Mrs. Wright was treated by Mr. Wright. He destroyed her passion of singing and killed her bird that sung. Jury of her Peers show that the ladies know what happened and they show empathy…

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The “Trifles” and “A Jury Of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell are very similar in the way that they both have got the same basic plot . However , one of them that is the trifles is a play and the other one is a short narrative story. According to me the story was easier to read and more clear to the reader as to how the various events were taking place but the play was difficult to understand as it was open ended it was made not very clear and also a play can be best understood when it is performed on stage as there are various other elements in a performance like multimedia-sound and lighting and not just the text which can be used to show various important aspects .…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Melody Graulich Essay

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Melody Graulich portrays another side of domestic violence that no one has really touched on. Graulich writes about her mother who had to grow up in a household where the father hits the wife. The author provides several other literary evidence about the women’s history of domestic violence in the West.…

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The first type of uncontrolled emotion that can lead to bad consequences is fear. In Trifles, the reader understands that Mrs. Wright has significantly changed as a…

    • 1011 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Susan Glaspell's Trifles

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Webster’s Dictionary definition of trifle is: something that does not have much value or importance (“trifle”). When one looks at the title of Susan Glaspell’s short play, at first they may think that it is as the title implies; unimportant or the story being told is for nothing more than entertainment. Upon further examination and consultation of critical sources, the reader is able to tease out a deeper meaning. The play, Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell is an intricately weaved narrative on gender roles and home life as it was in early 1900s.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles, John Wright is a farmer who has been murdered by an…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Have you ever wondered; just how much can one person take from another? What amount of cruelty and abuse persuades the fury in a typically passive person to leap into aggressive action? Susan Glaspell's play Trifles shows us just how far one woman, Mrs. Wright, is pushed before she snaps. This is a classic tale of spousal abuse, based off of a true story, which was not too uncommon and almost expected back in the late nineteenth century. Back then women were controlled by their husbands and were seen as insignificant by all the men around them. In this play the women fight the patronizing and belittling society and join together to support another woman. During this time in history, "marital conflict, frequently including violence, was mostly taken for granted in many working-class communities; in itself, it was rarely sufficient to warrant communal censure." (Hammerton 155)…

    • 1700 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Human nature is an easily susceptible phenomenon. Susan B. Pfefferès Life as We Knew It, distinctly demonstrates this in all of the characters personalities in her novel, as they are attacked by the upcoming dilemma of the Moon being struck by a meteor, propelling it closer to Earth. Foremost, the theme is developed through Reverend Marshall’s deceitful actions stemming from selfishness, the several inhumane breakdowns Miranda's mom Laura faces, and the barbaric characteristics of the civilians in Miranda's town as they desperately strive for survival. Unquestionably, a prevalent theme in Life as We Knew It is that when survival becomes threatened, human characteristics such as kindness, compassion and sympathy will become stripped away.…

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Glaspell uses general stereotypes of the time periods gender specific roles. Leonard Mustazza very helpfully points out the difference between the genders and how the characters react to their position (Mustazza 1). Throughout the play, the male characters steers the readers into believing that a woman’s place is at the home, where she is spending most of her time cleaning and taking care of her husband. One knows this because the county attorney remarks, “I shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct” (Glaspell 746) after he was through surveying the kitchen. He implies that a women’s duty is to make sure that the home well taken care of. Also, the males expects the women to be submissive and to have the same values as their husbands. For…

    • 571 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays