Trifles Violence Quotes

Based on Hale's description, is seems like Mrs. Wright was pretty out of her mind after murdering her husband. Nah, she's not running around cackling with murderous joy. Instead, she seems completely numb and emotionally drained. It's interesting that this play gives us a look at the emotional toll a murder takes on the murderer.

This is the first time we here about the infamous rope. If we learned anything from our years of playing Clue and watching detective shows, the murder weapon is a big deal in any murder mystery. One thing that's cool about this play is that we never actually see it—in the same way that we never see the body or the murder suspect. Not your average murder mystery, right?

Here again, Glaspell gets a cool effect by leaving stuff out. Instead of giving us a graphic description of John Wright's strangled corpse, the playwright (like Hale) stops mid-sentence. By allowing the audience to imagine it, Glaspell makes us feel the violence even more.

Did you catch this symbolism? The jars violently shattered not long after the Wright household was shattered by violence. Just as the jars were shattered by cold, the Wright's marriage was shattered by the coldness Mr. Wright showed toward his wife.

The men take this to show that women are ridiculous and only worry about things that don't matter. But what if the fact that Mrs. Wright is worrying about her preserves while in jail shows just how unconcerned she is with the murder. What if in her heart of hearts she knows she did the right thing?

These lines are really important plot-wise. Notice how the play specifically points out that there was also a gun in the house. It's screaming at us to pay attention to the fact that the method of the murder is really important in this case.

Uh oh. Here's our first clue about the other murder that happened in this house. The rough way the door was ripped off its hinges immediately gives the ladies a bad feeling even though they don't know the whole story yet. You could see the image of a cage with its door violently ripped off as a symbol for the way Mrs. Wright used violence to escape the cage of her life.

The second corpse is found and the ladies put together the whole violet story. Mrs. Wright decided the whole eye-for-an-eye philosophy was a good idea. Mr. Wright wrung the neck of her bird, so she wrung his neck. Do you think the play is saying violent revenge is the way to go? Or does it leave things a little more ambiguous than that?

Here, Mrs. Peters admits that she had violent feelings herself once. We get it. If we watched somebody murder our kitten with a hatchet... grrrrr. Of course, even though Mrs. Peters understands Mrs. Wright's violent impulses, in the end Mrs. Peters didn't find the boy in his bed and chop him up with an axe. What does this say about the differences between the two women and the lives that helped to shape who they are?

These lines leave us with the basic moral conundrum of the play. No matter how you shake it, Mrs. Wright strangling her husband to death was a gruesome thing to do. Do the years of emotional abuse and murder of her pet bird justify this brutally violent crime? Are the women right to hide the evidence that could bring Mrs. Wright to justice? Is there any justice in the violent world of Trifles?