Trifles

As we were watching the play I was completely oblivious to the underlying topics this play covered. I'm one of those people who needs to re-read or re-watch something multiple times to truly understand the meaning of something. I thought Mr. Wann and Bonnie-Jean and the other actors did a wonderful job performing for us on Monday! They really got into their characters even though they had only been practicing for a short while. Susan Glaspell was a female playwright in the early 90's who covered topics such as abuse, violence, gender roles and the possibility that women were perhaps not inferior to men was something absurd and unheard of for her time.

The two men searched the house for clues and kept pointing out things that were out of order, blaming the women for the way the house looked such as it was dirty and crumbs on the table. The typical gender role was that the women had to care to the house and make the men happy.

The men in the play act superior to the women and didn’t believe that a woman was capable not only for murdering her husband but for covering up a murder. The two women looked at small details that Minnie would do everyday which led to crucial clues that the men overlooked. The woman act innocent and almost put on an entirely different persona when the men entered the room. I found it funny that the men had on this act that they ran the show when clearly it was the women who held all the power.

The common theme not only in the play but in the real world was that men were more capable than women on many levels, whereas women were looked at as weak but had to be home-makers. Susan Glaspell’s play mocks this theme and proves that maybe society was wrong. This was an incredibly brave move by Glaspell, although I’m sure she received a great deal of backlash it paved a new way for how women were viewed in society.