Blurred Boundaries in Susan Glaspells Trifles :: Trifles Essays

Blurred Boundaries in Trifles In her landmark feminist play, Trifles, Susan Glaspell offers a glitter at the complicated political and social systems that both silenced and divided women during their struggle for equality with men. In this simple but highly symbolic tale, a farmers wife, Minnie Wright, is accused of strangling her husband to death. The county attorney, the sheriff, a local farmer, the sheriffs wife and the farmers wife visit Minnies farm house. As the men look for clues, the women survey Minnies domestic environment. objet dart the men scoff at the womens interest in what they call trifles, the women discover Minnies strangled bird to realize that Minnies husband had killed the bird and Minnie had, in turn, killed him. They bond in acknowledgment that women all go through the same things--its all just different kind of the same thing (1076). As their horror builds and the women unravel the murder, they hold to cooperate with one another, conspiring to protect Mi nnie against the men by hiding the incriminating evidence. Womens slow reluctance to cooperate across division even in the present of male oppression, as depicted in Glaspells play, symbolizes the difficulty women had in creating a united cross break sisterhood when struggling for suffrage during the Gilded Age. This conformation conflict was exacerbated by the socio-economic dynamics of the day. Middle class women often employed effecting class women in their homes as servants. Employing women with hypothetically oppressive wages in their private lives, while at the same time fighting for the economic freedom of all women in their public lives placed middle class women in a hypocritical bind. As historian Lois Banner reports, In the 1900s and 1910s there was an outpouring of writings on the so-called servant problem--the shortage of women willing to work as cooks and maids. . . .It was not simply that they servants were expected to be paid long hours and were not well paid th ey were subject to the whims and status anxieties of their mistresses (52). The control that middle class women reportedly bestowed upon their domestic laborers extended into the larger picture much of middle class club work focused on the reform of working class women. The imposition of middle class values onto working class and black womens lives alienated these women--making the feelings of sisterhood necessary for solidarity, nearly impossible. As historian Nancy Hewitt explains, When true women i.