Research Guides: Trifles: Articles

Articles

"A Different Kind of the Same Thing": Narrative, Experiential Knowledge, and Subjectivity in Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations
This essay uses theories of narrative to examine how Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations reflect and resist the ability of narratives to construct identities, create moral meanings, and impose truths. It also explores the dramatisation of experiential knowledge as a means of building communities.
"Murder, She Wrote": The Genesis of Susan Glaspell's "Trifles"
Susan Glaspell's 1916 play 'Trifles' and the story 'A Jury of her Peers' are based on her coverage of a murder trial in Iowa in 1901 when she was a newspaper reporter. In the real and fictional trials, a woman is convicted of murdering her husband, based on circumstantial evidence. In her fiction, Glaspell presented oppression of a woman and the brutal conditions that could justify murdering her husband, creating an early feminist work.
Criminal law and women: giving the abused woman who kills a jury of her peers who appreciate trifles
Susan Glaspell's 1916 play "Trifles" and its short story version "A Jury of Her Peers" presents the deliberations of a jury of women discussing the conduct of an abused women who killed her husband, the work demonstrates the problems of women's access to justice under laws written by men. At the time Glaspell wrote these works, laws were being developed to address wife abuse, but domestic violence went unnoticed and unabated for 50 years. Political and legal action by women is needed to integrate the perspective of women and other outsiders into the legal system.
Double-Voiced Discourse in Susan Glaspell's "Trifles"
There are thirteen double-voiced discourses found in Trifles. They represent two opposite ideologies; patriarchy and feminism delivered by the male and female characters. The discourses show personal power, debate ideas, and building solidarity. The male character uses the discourse to display personal power. Meanwhile, the female characters use the discourses to debate ideas and build their solidarity as women.
A drama of detection: Susan Glaspell's Trifles
Though Susan Glaspell's well-known one-act play Trifles (1916) has been predominantly framed by the themes of female condition at the turn of the twentieth-century United States, it is intrinsically built on the concepts of detection and crime. The dramatic text reveals a narrative tendency that keeps deferring the detection of a case of murder committed within the farmhouse of the Wright family. Against the backdrop of its social and cultural context, the play gives voice to its female characters in the inspection of the crime whereas the male characters fail to detect the motivation behind the murder.
The Iterability of the Woman Condition: a Derridean Reading of Glaspell’s Trifles
Derrida defines artifactualities as artificially made norms by institutions and hierarchies which turn into conventions over time in dominating mankind, conventions which must be recognized and dismantled. Every particular event or presence can assume its singularity outside such biased tautology by iterating itself to generate its own specific body of norms in supplementing itself. Accordingly, this study tries to highlight the female logic and the iterability of the woman condition against patriarchal artifactualities in Glaspell’s Trifles (1916).
Silent justice in a different key: Glaspell's Trifles
Holstein explores the varying perceptions and choices the men and women of Susan Glaspell's early 20th-century play "Trifles" make with regard to the evidence of a murder and of their relationship to power over the course of the events therein depicted.
Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” in the Light of Ecofeminism
Throughout historical decades the unfair system of life in patriarchal societies and the oppression of women by men have always been key concepts in the literature of the world that have given rise to hot topics of discussion among different nations, questioning the real motive behind such trends. Hence, by examining Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” through the lens of Ecofeminism the present paper aims to show how it can be considered as an ecofeminist work of literature doing away with the notions that pertain to the oppression of women and Nature by men.

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