Trifles Analysis

Turn of the 20th century, America It's a wee bit tricky (because Glaspell doesn't give us an exact year) but we do know the play was first performed in 1916. So we'll go ahead and assume it's set s...

Like most every other play, Trifles is all dialogue and doesn't have a narrator through whose eyes or voice we learn the story. The characters get out there on stage, giving us all the drama they'v...

It's no big secret how Trifles qualifies as drama. It's a play, right? It's a piece of literature written mostly in dialogue that's never fully realized until it's brought to life by actors in fron...

This play is definitely dark. We're got a brutal murder, the corpse of dead bird, and the first stage direction tells us we're in "gloomy kitchen" of a "now abandoned farmhouse" (1). From the first...

There's no doubt that, with Trifles, Glaspell was channeling the theatre's founding father of realism: Henrik Ibsen. Just like Ibsen, Glaspell has her characters speak like normal people do. Yeah,...

The title of the play is oozing with irony. The title comes from this gem of a line from Hale: "Well, women are used to worrying about trifles" (132). He says this in response to the fact that Mrs....

All right, let's zoom in on the end of this play—and by that we mean the last two lines... COUNTY ATTORNEY: [facetiously]: Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. S...

Never fear. You're not going to be struggling up the mountain with this one. The action is straightforward, and Glaspell makes her feminist themes so blatant that even the most clueless men of her...

The whole gang shows up at the Wrights' gloomy farmhouse, and we get a heaping scoop of back-story and also find out what everybody is here to do. Basically, Mrs. Wright is in the slammer because...

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters enter into the gloomy world of the Wright farmhouse like a couple of Alices into an even creepier Wonderland. Though Mrs. Hale is more outspoken than Mrs. Peters, both w...

Sorry, this play doesn't follow a three-act structure. Why, you ask? Because it's only has one act.In three act structure, we know the first act is over when the characters finally commit to whate...

George Cram Cook, Glaspell's husband, gave up a promising academic career to be a socialist farmer (Source). When the company politics of the Provincetown Players got to be too much for Susan and G...

We get the feeling that nobody's had sex in the Wright house since their wedding night—and maybe not even then. The point is there's zero steaminess here. Everybody is on the scene of a murder, s...