The play opens on the scene of an abandoned farmhouse. Glaspell might have chosen the kitchen of the Wright home as the setting for Trifles because she wanted to make a hint that the theme and the plot are about the past. The key to this crime answer is in the past. Because things around them look unpleasant and unfinished.
The play establishes its themes in its opening moments. The setting, a messy kitchen, reflects this. The women stand together, highlighting both the way they have been pushed together by their male-dominated society but also, possibly, their loyalty to each other over their husbands, a topic explored in the play.
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The events of the play happen today just to the following. In my opinion, the wife just left her husband if she was hurt by her husband killing the bird. And she could become a successful woman nowadays. That’s it. But at that time their male-dominated society established such conditions for women just to bear the situation in her family and wait to prove that he was wrong and revenge him. In the late twentieth century, feminists rediscovered and reinterpreted Trifles as a feminist work because it dealt with the themes of patriarchal oppression and female ability in the domestic arena. The men never recognize that they have forced the women to be concerned about these things, by not allowing them to be concerned about anything else. The men’s dismissal reflects a larger mindset of devaluing women and their opinions and interests in general.
The main character of the play is never actually seen. I see the play’s protagonist in a male-dominated society. It is the reason for the events. Because of that the crime happened. If the family lived in another time, for example, nowadays, probably, everything would be different. On the other hand, Mrs. Minnie Wright is the main character. The play is about her life, her struggle, and her crime.
Even though we never see John Wright on stage, we tend to form an impression of the type of person he was.
We obtain information about him through other characters’ impressions and words.
The men repeatedly dismiss things as beneath their notice if they are things such as the canning jars of fruit that are, in their opinions, women’s concerns. The men never recognize that they have forced the women to be concerned about these things, by not allowing them to be concerned about anything else. The men’s dismissal reflects a larger mindset of devaluing women and their opinions and interests in general. Mrs. Hale’s guilt over not visiting Minnie shows that she understands, to some extent, Minnie’s loneliness – even that she knew of Minnie’s loneliness before these events – but that she put her own life and husband before trying to help Minnie, before showing loyalty to another woman, and now blames herself for those choices. That John Wright is characterized as “a good man” demonstrates the standards by which society judges a man. These standards did not include or consider kindness to one’s wife. And these societal standards are so ingrained that even the two women accept them.
The women replace the men as the real protagonists of the play, wandering around the kitchen as they discover minor details that turn out to be clues throughout the rising action. During this time, our initial sense of the conflict shifts as the women increasingly begin to empathize with Minnie Wright and develop an understanding of her life, while steadily approaching the point of crisis in their discovery of the dead canary. In the process, the women both follow and upset the typical progression of a murder mystery by displacing the official local law enforcement as amateur crime solvers while moving away from the focused, analytical techniques. Even more significantly, the women succeed where the law does not despite their lack of a legal identity beyond that which they receive through their husbands, and in the process, they come to learn more about their own private identities.
The growing emotional bond between Minnie Wright and the two female protagonists is sufficient to tell her story without the need for a strong physical presence. The empty birdcage hints at Minnie's mental struggles, and we come to see that Minnie's identity connects intimately to that of the canary, the death of which must have overwhelmed her previous forbearance. 'The inferiority of women in this play is through body language. They stand close together. 'The women have come in slowly and stand close together near the door' (Glaspell).
From the very first part, they are somewhat timid in their place. As the drama goes on, each time the men seem to criticize Mrs. Wright, the women move closer together physically. This shows the bond of women in understanding how they are viewed by men. In this play, the characters can empathize so much with Mrs.Wright that they end up hiding the evidence of the murder (the dead bird) and take justice into their own hands by letting her off the hook. Women in this play understand what life is for other women.
While the men are downstairs, the women occupy themselves with looking around the kitchen and living room. They take note of Mrs. Wright's canned fruit and the fact that it has busted in the cold weather. The men laugh at them for 'worrying over trifles'. The men go upstairs to look at the murder site and leave the women downstairs. At first glance, details noted by Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale appear to be what the men refer to as 'trifles,' in that they do not have any obvious bearing on the physical facts of the case. However, although Mrs. Hale defends her right to think about 'little things' while waiting for evidence, we see by the end that, ironically, the little things are by definition the evidence. Unlike the women, the men overlook the emotional implications of the unbaked bread, half-cleaned towels, and messy stitching on the quilt. Because they see that these objects represent a warping of domestic life, they notice Minnie's probable state of mind and turn from outside observers of the crime scene to increasingly active investigators. Simultaneously, throughout the play, the two women suffer from their separate internal struggles, as Mrs. Hale tries to articulate her guilt at having abandoned Mrs. Wright while Mrs. Peters weighs her trust in the male-defined realms of duty and the law against her instinctive sympathy for Mrs. Wright's troubles.
The symbolism of the dead bird and its cage is the following. Minnie is like a dead bird. The cage is her circumstances, she was living in. In the end, Minnie is kind of out of the cage. But she is not free, she is “dead” – she is in jail. The discovery of the birdcage introduces the concepts of imprisonment and isolation in the play. Although the bird is missing, the presence of a cage connects to Minnie’s situation, isolated as she was in her husband’s house.
To my mind, the “Trifles” title better captures the theme of the play because the author underlined the fact that there is a conflict between the men and women. What the men refer to as 'trifles,' in that they do not have any obvious bearing on the physical facts of the case. Hale knew that Minnie was worried her canning jars would explode in the cold weather, and the sheriff joked that a woman would worry about such things while held for murder.
At last Mrs. Hale reminds the sheriff in the jail that she was planning to finish the quilt by knotting it. So these references suggest more than simply technical terms for two ways of making a quilt because Minnie was thinking about revenge during all these years passed since her bird’s death in other words, finish this deal –or to knot the quilt. All these years long she was quilting and knotting her revenge plan.
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