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Authors
Susan Glaspell (1876-1882)
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Plays by Susan Glaspell—including Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors—appeared in 1987. Another collection is “Lifted Masks” and Other Works (1993). Major Novels of Susan Glaspell, edited by Martha C. Carpenter, was published in 1995. Two biographies are Arthur E. Waterman’s Susan Glaspell (1966) and Barbara O. Rajkowska’s Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (2000). Critical studies include Marcia Noe’s Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland (1983), Veronica A. Makowsky’s Susan Glaspell’s Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work (1993), and J. Ellen Gainor’s Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48 (2001). A collection of critical essays is Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction (1995), edited by Linda Ben-Zvi.
If you have read Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper,” Freeman’s A New England Nun, or poems by Frost or Robinson about the loneliness and psychological pressures of rural New England life early in the twentieth century, you will be on familiar ground with Glaspell’s Trifles, which first was published as a short story. What we see here is a rural New England before the coming of the interstate highways, the ski resort industry, and floods of weekenders from Boston, New York, and other major cities. This is both a mystery story and a story about women coming together imaginatively within a world and a justice system dominated by men. With a scattering of evidence, two women piece together an understanding of what someone like themselves has had to endure, and what has forced her over the brink. They empathize in ways that the men of this place cannot understand. The American twentieth century gave us many dark tales about farm families in isolation. How does Trifles contribute to that tradition?
Questions for Discussion and Writing
1. Think about the challenge of making this play longer - of providing more character development, more background about the Sheriff, Mrs. Peters, Mrs. Hale, and life in the Wright household. If someone were to make a feature film out of Trifles, the studios would require a length of at least ninety minutes. What might be gained or lost in such an expansion?
2. If you were casting this play for a major production, what contemporary actors and actresses would you think of as ideal for the various parts, and why?
3. We now read Trifles in an age of Stephen King and ILM. The bookstores are flooded with grisly tales of the New England outback; and in the film versions of such stories wide-screen gore is standard fare. In contrast, Glaspell’s play is austere and understated. The murder has happened “yesterday” and we don’t see the violence, the blood, or the body; most of the “action” involves two un-heroic friends in a kitchen, looking at small clues. The big revelation is a little dead bird. This kind of drama can therefore seem very odd. What moments or qualities in Glaspell’s play strike you as retaining their freshness? Does the play still have an impact? Talk with a friend about understatement and inference as techniques in narration, in times when visual “special effects” and earsplitting stereo are the stock-in-trade at the multiplex. Can small quiet dramas have a place in our own popular culture? Or are we, for the moment at least, deaf to the whispered voices of Trifles?
