John Doe
English 110
Hale
Drama Argument
March 23, 1998

Justice is Served in Glaspell's Trifles

    Set in the early twentieth century on a farm in the Midwest, Susan Glaspell's play Trifles shows the limited rights that women had at that time and the disrespectful and condescending ways that men treated women. On the surface Minnie Wright, the unseen protagonist, gets away with murder because two other characters, Mrs. Hale (a neighboring farm woman) and Mrs. Peters (the investigating Sheriff's wife) conceal evidence that would have convicted Minnie of strangling her sleeping husband to death. Given the historical context of the play and the way women were treated at the time, the correctness of the women's behavior does not make them so culpable. In fact, a closer examination of the play reveals that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters behaved appropriately and justly by protecting Minnie Wright.
    Before discussing the reasons I believe Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters behave appropriately, I should explain that they clearly behaved illegally. There is no doubt that the two women broke the law when they concealed the dead bird and also that they knew they were breaking the law. Mrs. Peters says, " Mr. Henderson said coming out that what was needed for the case was a motive; something to show anger, or - sudden feeling"(1378). Furthermore, after the women find the dead canary that John Wright apparently killed and that would have clearly provided the motive for his wife's murder, the women lie to the County Attorney. When asked what happened to the bird, Mrs. Hale says, "We think the cat got it" (1381). This evidence shows that the women have definitely broken the law, but I believe the women have served a greater good by protecting Minnie Wright. They have served justice.
    If law were to be a main factor in judging whether or not Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters behaved appropriately, it is important to understand that the law treated women unjustly in the early twentieth century. At a symbolic level, we can see how the representatives of the law, the County Attorney and Sheriff Peters, have little or no respect for women. When they enter the Wrights' home, they criticize Mrs. Wright's housekeeping: "Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?" However, Mrs. Hale defends her saying, "Farmers' wives have their hands full" (1376). He does not see the difficult job that a sole woman without children to help her would have in maintaining the farm, nor does he consider that the deputy watching the house after the murder may have been the one to mess the place up. Like the laws at the time, he clearly did not fully appreciate the challenges a woman in the country had to face. At the end of the play the representatives of the law show further disrespect when the attorney continues a joke about the women's interest in whether Minnie was going to quilt or knot her sewing: he says, "facetiously" according to the stage direction, "Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it" (1383). Of course his dismissive attitude is ironic because the ladies attention to details has shown that Minnie Wright did kill her husband, but more importantly it is further evidence of the lack of respect the law showed towards women. Consequently if the law does not treat women with respect or fairness, then legality is not a fair criterion with which to judge Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Peter's actions. A more appropriate measure would be whether or not the women were just in their actions. Did the women's behavior serve justice?
    I believe that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters did serve justice by protecting Minnie Wright. To understand this view, I need to explain why Minnie killed her husband and why justice would not have been served if the women had turned over the evidence to the sheriff and county attorney. First, John Wright clearly abused his wife. Mrs. Hale, who knew Minnie before she was married, comments on how she transformed from an active and cheerful woman before she was married into a passive and unhappy woman after the marriage. She mentions that John Wright was a "close" (1377) or stingy man and that prevented Minnie from being able to join the ladies auxiliary and contributed to her isolation and sadness. She also says that she wishes she'd come to visit Minnie, but that her house wasn't "cheerful" (1380). In addition, she says that John was "a hard man. . . . Like a raw wind that gets to the bone" (1380). Finally, when deducing that he killed the bird, she comments that Wright wouldn't like the bird--"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too" (1381). All of this evidence goes to show Wright's mental and emotional abuse of his wife. She began as cheerful happy woman and ended up being a woman driven to murder her husband before he drained what little life she had left.
    Some might argue that John Wright does not physically abuse Minnie and that her actions cannot justify murder.  Certainly there is no evidence of physical abuse in the play, but emotional abuse can be just as devastating, if not more so. To be trapped in a marriage where the smallest pleasure, having a pet bird to love and care for, is taken away by the person who is supposed to love you the most is a horrible life. It would not have been just if Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Peters had turned Minnie over to the law. They are, after all, more of a "jury of her peers" and are better able to judge her predicament. If they had turned her over, Minnie Wright would have clearly been found guilty under the law, but no one would have taken into account the emotional abuse that drove her to kill her husband. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the courts would consider the mitigating circumstances that drove her to kill her husband in an act of emotional self-defense, but the circumstances would not have been factored in at the beginning of the twentieth century-Mrs. Wright would have just been found guilty and probably hung. That judgment might be legal, but it wouldn't be just considering that her husband drove her to her desperate act by his own acts of cruelty.
    If law is the primary value by which we judge the behavior of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, then they are surely wrong in their decision to protect Minnie Wright. However, I have shown that justice is a more reasonable standard to judge the women's behavior because the laws at the time did not sufficiently respect or defend the rights of women. The fact that John Wright killed his wife's bird may seem a trifle as the title of the play suggests, but the killing of the bird represents the killing of Minnie's self that Wright has been gradually enacting and a final action that represents all of the years of emotional abuse that he has submitted her to. Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Peters make a difficult but just choice when they protect Minnie Wright from a chauvinistic society that fails to treat women as equals under the law.