Marina Angel, “Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers: Women Abuse in a Literary and Legal Context”(1997) 45 Buffalo Law Review 779 at 779-808 (edited)

Introduction

Susan Glaspell's story of an abused wife who kills her abusive husband was told in 1916, first as a play, Trifles, then as a short story, A Jury of Her Peers. The story is written from the perspective of those closed out of a legal system--in this instance, women--and how they react when that legal system is about to destroy one of their own. Women did not make homicide law as it existed in 1916: they could not be judges; they could not be legislators; they could not vote until 1920; they could not serve on juries in most states until the 1940s.

…

The women in Susan Glaspell's story see different evidence than the men in the story. They perceive and reason from the mundane facts of an abused woman's daily life, from "trifles," to conclude that she killed her abusive husband. They then act as "a jury of her peers" to make an actual trial difficult, if not impossible, by destroying the evidence that would convict her of murder.

The women in the story start from different facts and reach different moral and legal conclusions than the men in the story. The men's views of fact and law reflect our traditional legal system, which men created and continue to dominate. Susan Glaspell's story is about different experiences, perceptions, values, and methods of analysis--issues that we all must learn to deal with in our increasingly diverse societies.

The term "second-generation diversity issues" is currently in vogue but means different things to different people. To the traditional outsiders, women and minority men, "second generation diversity issues" means the world must adjust to us. To those who created the existing systems, the term means those newly admitted must adjust to them. If we continue to speak in substantially different voices, we all will have to learn new methods of listening in order to communicate with one another. To appreciate other views, we must learn the joy and uncertainty of valuing differences.

The major challenge of our era is understanding and including diverse perspectives and values while, at the same time, making the moral choices necessary to develop and enforce laws responsive to and accepted by our society. Ending the deep seated problem of woman abuse requires a multifaceted approach that enlists the creative use of all our perspectives and abilities.

Susan Glaspell chose a literary vehicle to prompt an examination of woman abuse and its legal legitimacy. Such a narrative voice "can convey the subjective feel of experiences in a way that triggers understanding of others and an emphatic response to their plight, thereby changing our moral beliefs and our moral assessment of law . . . ." Susan Glaspell's story led me to ask who she was and how she was able to produce a story in 1916 that reflects the major legal and moral issues of today. It led me to examine the history of women's struggles to participate in the political processes of this country, including the right to vote and the right to serve as jurors.

I. The Story--"Fact"

A debate currently rages about the appropriateness of stories as the basis for legal analysis. From my first day as a law student, I thought of the cases in the law books we studied as short stories about real human beings, selected by editors and put together in sequences of similar but slightly different stories to illuminate moral dilemmas and to show how the lawmakers of our society resolved them. Lawyers are taught to examine the facts of cases carefully so as to learn to derive rules of law from facts. There is nothing new in this. Judges made common law for centuries in this fashion, and before the common law, the Bible did it with parables.

Value systems are built into stories, but some stories have been around so long and have been repeated so widely that they are taken as objective, scientific truth. We have all been socialized by these stories which foreclose recognition of other perspectives. For those who start from a different perspective, many are too overwhelmed by the power and influence of the dominant perspective to challenge the validity of the stories.

I do not understand why there is a fight about using stories in legal analysis. I do understand that there can be a fight about whether we use my story or your story. A court's recitation of the facts of a case is always a story, an edited version of reality. Too often, the facts that have been left out are the ones that outsiders care about. As a result, the story of facts that courts create can be fiction, and the fiction of outsiders, such as Susan Glaspell, can be fact.

Having outsiders tell their stories, often in literary terms, allows different perceptions of facts that can lead to different perceptions of law. We must go beyond existing legal doctrines in order to see the real horror and harm of woman abuse. When a legal system is very warped, minor adjustments have little impact and only serve to mask major faults. An outsider view is needed to reveal major faults. Traditional law allowed possessive and angry men to act out by beating and killing "their women." The law was developed by men who could identify with other men in pain and legitimized their abusive acts against women in such a way as to hide the horror of the behavior.

Traditionally, a veil of secrecy, of privacy, has been drawn over sexual and physical abuse of women in the family. The failure of women in every community to tell their stories even to each other, much less within and without their communities, has made possible, despite overwhelming statistics, the denial of such abuse by society and its laws. Each community, each group (or is it the males of each group?) has guilt-tripped its women into maintaining privacy in order to protect the public image of the group (or is it the image of the males of each group?).

Susan Glaspell was a popular author whose works centered on women's lives in the American Midwest. She lived from 1876 to 1948 and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931. Susan Glaspell grew up in Davenport, Iowa, graduated from Drake University in 1900, and began her career as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News primarily covering the statehouse.

Her major newspaper stories, however, involved the case of State v. Hossack. As a young woman, Susan Glaspell covered the 1901 trial of an Iowa farm wife charged with killing her husband with a hatchet while he slept. The wife pled not guilty, claiming she was asleep in bed with her husband but did not awaken quickly enough to see the real killer. The case affected Susan Glaspell strongly and inspired Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers fifteen years later.

Susan Glaspell's initial reporting on the case was unsympathetic and stereotypical. She had been socialized to accept the traditional male view of the facts and law of woman abuse. Her headline read in part, "Mrs. Hossack thought to be crazy." She reported "Hossack was not supposed to have an enemy in the world." Only an insane woman would have killed such a husband. Susan Glaspell emphasized the most damaging evidence, that the wife claimed she was asleep beside her husband but did not wake up while he was murdered with a hatchet. Her view of the wife changed after she visited the farmhouse possibly with the sheriff and the county attorney. Mrs. Hossack went from being "cold, calm, and menacing" to "worn and emaciated," from "powerful" to "older, frailer, and more maternal."

The facts as reported by the Iowa Supreme Court in its 1902 opinion in State v. Hossack, the wife's appeal from her conviction for murder, indicate some sensitivity to the situation of an abused wife. The couple had been married for thirty-three years and had nine children, five of whom were at home on the family farm at the time of the killing. The court understood that "the family life of the Hossacks had not been pleasant, perhaps the husband was most to blame. He seems to have been somewhat narrow-minded, and quite stern in his determination to control all family matters." There was a history of conflict between husband and wife. "On one occasion, some years prior to the tragedy, she went to the house of one Haynes, and wanted him to come and quiet her husband, saying: "He will kill some of us before morning."' This statement indicates abuse not only of the wife but also of the children.

Motive was a key factor in the Hossack case, just as it was in A Jury of Her Peers. If Mrs. Hossack killed her husband because of his abuse of her and their children, this would not have been a reductive or exculpatory factor at her trial. In fact, it would have provided grounds for finding her guilty of premeditated murder, the highest degree of homicide. It was therefore to Mrs. Hossack's benefit to claim, with the full support of her children, that the abuse had ceased by the time of the killing, thereby eliminating a motive and allowing blame to be placed on an unknown stranger.

A year before the killing, on Thanksgiving Day 1899, the conflict escalated and the wife left to live with a married daughter. According to the Iowa Supreme Court: "Finally three neighbors were called in sic, and through their efforts all difficulties were apparently healed" and she returned to the family farm. The court admitted "that the wife did not place strong reliance upon the pledges made by her husband" since she asked one of the neighbors to remain all night because she was afraid that her husband would make trouble again as soon as they left. There was a witness who stated that two months after the purported reconciliation, the wife wept and said, "It is just as bad as it ever was."' However, with one exception, no more family difficulties were made public. The children all supported their mother, testifying that the conflict had ceased.

There was again a family reunion at the farm on Thanksgiving Day 1900 preceding the Saturday on which the killing occurred. The court stated, "so far as known, there was no difficulty between the parents on this day." However, an abusive situation can peak on a holiday, as it had for the Hossacks the prior Thanksgiving. On the night of the killing, the husband and wife were in bed together. She claimed she was awakened after midnight "by a noise such as would be made by striking two boards together." She jumped out of bed, went to the sitting room and heard the door close. "Then, hearing groans or strange sounds from her husband, she called the children ... ." They entered the bedroom and found him dead.

Although the Iowa Supreme Court's rendition of the facts indicates that it understood it was dealing with an abusive husband and an abused wife and family, most of its statement of law is unrelated to abuse. Motive was the major issue in the case: the court found error in the trial court's refusal to give the wife's requested instruction on motive, but it did not discuss the requested instruction; the court found no error in the instruction regarding the feelings between husband and wife, but did not discuss this instruction either. The court reversed on the basis of improperly introduced evidence, ordering excluded from a retrial three photographs of the body, three hairs from the ax and the expert testimony regarding them.

After filing her last stories in the case, Susan Glaspell abandoned journalism and turned to writing fiction. She may never have learned that the original conviction was reversed and that the retrial of Mrs. Hossack resulted in a hung jury. In 1902 she did graduate work at the University of Chicago and "was stimulated by the intellectual and artistic ferment of the Chicago Renaissance." She then returned to Davenport where she met George Cram Cook, Jig, her future husband. In 1907 she used her royalties to travel in Europe and live in Paris. She then settled in New York City, where she was followed by Jig, described as a "flamboyant bohemian," who tried business, farming, play writing, acting and producing. Susan Glaspell married George Cram Cook in 1913 and thereafter spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts and winters in New York City's Greenwich Village. She mixed with major literary figures and dealt with the leading political issues of the day. She was one of the founders of Heterodoxy, a New York feminist organization. Her friend, Ruth Hale, founded the Lucy Stone League, an organization dedicated to the importance of women using their birth names. Women's suffrage was the major feminist issue of the day, and women's jury service was closely related to it.

In 1915, Susan Glaspell and her husband founded the Provincetown Players as a vehicle for themselves and their literary friends, who included, among others, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, and Wilbur Daniel Steele. "In the seven years of their existence the Provincetown Players produced ninety-four plays by forty-eight authors," fifteen by Eugene O'Neill and eleven by Susan Glaspell. Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff and Susan Glaspell's Trifles were produced in 1916, the second season of the Provincetown Players. Her story adaptation, A Jury of Her Peers, appeared in Every Week in 1916 and in Best American Short Stories of 1917.

A Jury of Her Peers was the culmination of a growth process that Susan Glaspell underwent, beginning with the trial on which she reported as a young woman in 1901. By 1916, she was a well published author who had lived in major centers of American and European culture. She had a depth of understanding of feminism and woman abuse that was absent from her early newspaper reports on the Hossack case. The short story was a critique of law and the legal system by a politically aware and activist woman of 1916. The viewer of Trifles or the reader of A Jury of Her Peers is forced to take the perspective of outsiders. The stories not only center on women characters but also connects their different views of facts and law to their final judgment.

…. [Angel goes on to discuss the influence of classical Greek literature on A Jury of Her Peers]

II. The First Wave of Feminism: History and Philosophy

To appreciate A Jury of Her Peers it is necessary to understand the time in which Susan Glaspell lived and worked. The American women's movement had a first wave, dating from the mid-Nineteenth Century through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment which gave women the right to vote in 1920, and a second wave starting in the 1960s. Both waves were concerned about woman abuse.

The first wave grew out of the Abolitionist Movement and adapted its rhetoric to equal rights for women. It began at the 1840 anti-slavery convention in London when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were denied delegate status and relegated to the balcony. American feminists drew comparisons between abused wives and female slaves who were beaten and argued that the status of the married woman "under the Common Law, was nearly as degraded as that of the slave on the Southern plantation." The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, the first wave's Declaration of Independence, stated that women were deprived of their "inalienable right to the elective franchise [and compelled] to submit to laws, in the formation of which they had no voice." Among those laws, the Declaration specifically condemned the marriage contract in which a woman was "compelled to promise obedience to her husband [who had the power] to administer chastisement." Chastisement was a euphemism for marital assault. In 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton addressed the Joint Judiciary Committee of the New York Legislature on the specific issue of wife abuse.

The period from 1870 to 1890 represented a high point of interest in violence against women, receiving particular attention in Chicago, the city where Susan Glaspell did her graduate work, and Boston, the capital of the state where she produced Trifles. The Protective Agency for Women and Children, founded in Chicago in 1885, was the major Nineteenth Century organization aiding female victims of violence. It provided legal aid and monitored courtrooms to assure fair treatment of victims; it provided financial assistance to help battered women secure property held in their husbands' names. The agency referred homeless abused women to a shelter operated by the Women's Club of Chicago. In Boston, The Women's Journal was published by Lucy Stone. In 1876, she started reporting a weekly list of crimes against women, highlighting wife beating and wife murder. Noting that horses and dogs received more protection than abused wives, she called for protective legislation.

Attacks on woman abuse took multiple forms, including major changes in the law: reforming the civil law to allow an abused wife to legally gain her freedom from her abuser through divorce; reforming the criminal law to eliminate "the rule of thumb"--the legal right of a husband to beat his wife with a rod no thicker than his thumb; passing the Married Women's Property Acts to allow married women to hold property and to sue and be sued in their own right; introducing Prohibition to eliminate wife beating attributed to drunkenness; and, most importantly, gaining the right to vote, the symbol of full political equality that would empower women and allow them to address those problems that concerned them most, including abuse.

Both the vote and jury service are political rights that allow participation in the law-making and law-applying processes of our society. The link between the two was made clear in 1872 when Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women voted in Rochester, New York, but then were charged and tried before a male judge and an all-male jury for violating a provision of the 1870 Civil Rights Act designed to protect African American males. Susan B. Anthony denounced the all-male legal system that convicted her of a crime for voting and denied her a jury of her peers.

Women were formally denied the opportunity to participate in the centennial celebration of American independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1876. The National Woman Suffrage Association protested by parading with the Declaration of Rights of Women. Susan B. Anthony read the section that included women's right to jury service:

The right of trial by jury of one's peers was so jealously guarded that States refused to ratify the original constitution until it was guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. And yet the women of this nation have never been allowed a jury of their peers--being tried in all cases by men, native and foreign, educated and ignorant, virtuous and vicious. Young girls have been arraigned in our courts for the crime of infanticide; tried, convicted, hanged--victims, perchance, of judge, jurors, advocates--while no woman's voice could be heard in their defense.

The idea that one is entitled to a jury of one's peers comes from Magna Carta and is guaranteed by our Constitution. Jury service allows participation in our political process by individuals, and, through those individuals, by the groups from which they emerged. Individuals have the opportunity to be tried by those who are their peers, by those who share, or have some understanding of, their realities and beliefs. Juries made up of ordinary people protect ordinary people from governmental overreaching. Alexis DeTocqueville observed in 1835 that the American jury is "as direct and as extreme a consequence of the sovereignty of the people as universal suffrage." He believed that "the list of citizens qualified to serve on juries must increase and diminish with the list of electors."

Jury service ensures participation in our law-making processes on multiple levels. It exposes individuals to the law applicable to criminal and civil cases and allows them to know and question its appropriateness. It empowers individuals to participate in the application of the law within our third branch of government, the judicial branch. It allows individuals to make law through the concept of reasonableness, which runs throughout our law, including our homicide law.

The standard of reasonable conduct is determined from the viewpoint of the reasonable person. Since each of us believes s/he is the reasonable person, jury service enables us to apply our values to determine whether conduct is legal or not. Jurors tell each other stories during their deliberations. To reach a unanimous verdict, normally all jurors must be convinced of one point of view. When there are diverse viewpoints, jurors have to work at listening to and hearing each other in order to reach a unanimous verdict. If diversity does not exist in the jury room, important stories will not be told and heard. Those who serve as jurors spread the knowledge of different stories within the jury room and within society when they return and, in turn, tell their stories of jury service to their friends and relatives.

A jury can also engage in law-making through jury nullification when the law as explained by a trial judge does not comport with the jurors' moral beliefs. Jurors can simply acquit in spite of evidence supporting a conviction. Jury nullification rarely occurs in practice and is not sanctioned by law. However, constitutional theorists of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries argued that a jury could lawfully refuse to convict a defendant charged under any law it deemed unconstitutional. Susan Glaspell's women engaged in jury nullification by making a trial of Minnie Foster Wright impossible.

The Supreme Court's denial of the vote to women in Minor v. Happersett in 1874 mobilized the Suffrage Movement. After winning the vote in a number of states, suffrage was finally achieved nationally when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. The debates surrounding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment made it clear that the amendment meant more to the Suffrage Movement than the actual right to vote; it was viewed as an equal rights amendment meant to ensure women's full equality in all political processes, including jury service. The debates provided the context and rhetoric to which Susan Glaspell responded with A Jury of Her Peers.

Two philosophical debates influenced the struggle for women's rights during both the first and second waves of feminism: one is whether the world can be divided into a personal, private sphere and an opposing political, public sphere; the other is whether equality is defined by sameness or differences.

The personal, private sphere has, for our society and others, included home, marriage, and family. A defined zone of privacy is beyond the control of the state and governed by preexisting power relationships. However, political choices determine whether to allow a zone of privacy and, if so, how to define it. Matters important to women--our homes, our children, our families, our marriages--have been defined as personal, private and beyond the control of the state. Abuse in the personal, private sphere was left to the inequitable physical, economic, and political realities of women's lives.

Laws excluded women from the public sphere by denying the right to participate in government. Laws denied us the right to economic independence by prohibiting us from having an occupation or profession, holding property or maintaining a legal status independent of our fathers or husbands. In most families, women still take primary responsibility for raising children, nursing the ill or elderly and performing other unpaid services in the home. Labeling such activities as personal and private perpetuates injustice and forces "individual adjustments within the status quo." Abuse within the home is not just the individual tragedy of one woman but also a world-wide epidemic.

The debate on the nature of equality has focused on whether we should have an equality of sameness or an equality of differences. We can and should have both; differences do not necessarily create problems or justify negative treatment. Like the readers of Susan Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers, we must broaden our perceptions to appreciate diversity by understanding that bread is made up of different but equally important ingredients; that half-done things are incomplete. Appreciation of different but equally valuable qualities does not grow out of or result in bias but rather reflects fairness and justice.

In a related vein, lawyers and judges must supplement claims of rights with a recognition of responsibilities. It has been said that women "are "essentially connected,' not "essentially separate' from the rest of human life." But all of our lives are relational, not autonomous. Law must acknowledge the multiple ways in which people are affirmatively responsible to each other. Community and interconnection must be quilted together with privacy. These major political and philosophical debates underlie A Jury of Her Peers and the context in which the story was written.

III. The Story--"Fiction"

Susan Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers has a reality that the court missed in its report of the actual case which inspired her. She refined the fictional case of an abused woman who kills her abuser until it became the most dramatic and most legally difficult situation: The wife was emotionally abused but not obviously physically abused; she killed her sleeping husband sometime after the specific abusive incident took place; she killed by a means--strangulation with a knotted rope--considered difficult and abnormal for a woman, especially since there was a loaded gun in the house.

The trial in Susan Glaspell's story takes place in the abused woman's kitchen. The women form the jury and also serve as investigators, prosecutors and defense counsel. Women, both the women in the story and the women in the audience, come to the story with a different database than men, both the men in the story and the men in the audience. Women's facts of life are different from those of men. The women can walk into another woman's kitchen and know things about her life, because they have a "look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else . . . ."

Different views are inherent in dialogue. Susan Glaspell uses dialogue powerfully to express the different views of the sexes and of characters of the same sex. Sophocles in Antigone, Aristophanes in Lysistrata and Euripides in The Trojan Women similarly used dialogue. It has been said that Susan Glaspell's recognition of the connection between language and reality put her at the forefront of "contemporary feminist critics who see language at the heart of any possible realignment of the sexes." Until women's reality has a name its existence is deniable. Sexual harassment always existed but was not recognized by society until named; so also with woman abuse, marital rape, stalking, and separation attack.

Susan Glaspell's women have trouble finding words to convey their realities. For much of the story they are silent, and communicate through looks and pauses. They are confined in the kitchen, "the quintessential "woman's room"' while the men are free to explore the farm, the house and its grounds. Yet, the men are trapped by limited and rigid notions that force them to seek evidence primarily at the scene of the killing: the bedroom. They fail to find what they consider most important: motive. The women find motive while acting in their normal way in their normal room: the kitchen. Their discovery of evidence of motive and their agreement to destroy it are conveyed in silence.

Women's realities are not the legal or societal norms because they are closed out of the law-making bodies of society. Women's realities are "queer," a word constantly repeated in the story and used in the sense of strange when viewed from the dominant male perspective. To the men, the wife suspected of killing her husband "looked--queer." Women's tasks, perceptions, concerns, and values, which are critical to an understanding of the story, are defined and denigrated by the men as "trifles."

There are seven characters in Susan Glaspell's story. The two principal ones never appear: The accused, Minnie Foster Wright, is in jail, and her husband, John Wright, is dead. On stage are Martha Hale and her husband, Lewis Hale, who discovered the body; Mrs. Peters, also referred to as the sheriff's wife, and her husband, Henry Peters, the sheriff; and George Henderson, the county attorney.

Susan Glaspell effectively uses names to convey multiple symbolic identities. The men identify the women only through their relationship to particular men: they are Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Wright. As her story and characters develop, the accused wife evolves from Mrs. Wright, to Minnie Wright (a play on words), to Minnie Foster Wright, to Minnie Foster, her birth name. Martha Hale's independence is marked by the use of her full name when she is introduced as the first character in the story who also sets the stage for the development of the story. We never learn the first name of the most conventional female character, Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, although she also develops a feminist perspective as she increasingly identifies with Martha Hale and Minnie Foster Wright.

Susan Glaspell invented names and played with them in a manner similar to Aristophanes. Just as Aristophanes created the name of his protagonist, Lysistrata, Unraveler of Armies, so too did Susan Glaspell create the names Minnie Foster Wright and John Wright. Minnie was a popular name of the time, whose origin was the German for love. The German Minnesingers of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, like their troubadour counterparts in France, sang of courtly love. Minnie's birth name, Foster, connotes that she was fostered or nursed by her parents. Wright is a play on Mr. Right, whom Minnie Foster married in hopes of becoming Mrs. Right. In actuality, she becomes Mini or Minor Right. John is among the most common of names and was probably chosen by Susan Glaspell to remind us of the widespread nature of woman abuse. John Doe, a kind of Everyman, is used in legal documents when a man's name is unknown.

Martha Hale, the first character introduced in the short story, is also its hero. Hale means hero, but also sound and healthy and, as a verb, to pull forcibly or drag. The name Martha recalls the sister of Lazarus who was concerned with domestic tasks. All of these describe Martha Hale whose sound and healthy feminist approach to domestic life drags Mrs. Peters into a conspiracy to support Minnie Foster Wright.

The name Peters derives from the Greek <pi>ETPO<sigma>, meaning rock, and is associated with solidarity. St. Peter was the rock on which Christianity was founded. The sheriff, Henry Peters, is charged with upholding society's traditional values. His first name Henry is also associated with solidarity. George Henderson, the county attorney, is the other public official charged with upholding society's traditional values. Henderson means son of Henry, tying the county attorney directly to the sheriff.

There are repeated images in the story of things half-done, of isolation, of abuse. The short story opens with Martha Hale in her own kitchen with "her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted." The things half-done, "things begun--and not finished," are metaphors for the incomplete nature of our law and culture that does not appreciate the different but equally valuable viewpoints and contributions of women and men. Susan Glaspell's story demonstrates the value of diversity and the need to foster communication and cooperation among those with different viewpoints--not to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, but to replace isolation with connection.

A sense of isolation permeates as Susan Glaspell describes the "lonesome stretch of road" leading to the "lonesome-looking place" that is John Wright's farmhouse. Lewis Hale tells of his discovery of the body when he went to see whether John Wright would be willing to share expenses for a telephone, a form of communication that would ease the isolation of farm wives. Our first knowledge of the strained relationship between John and Minnie Wright comes from Mr. Hale, who says John Wright had refused a telephone before and did not talk much himself. Later in the story, Martha Hale describes Mr. Wright as "close." Mrs. Peters reports, "They say he was a good man." Martha Hale qualifies, "He didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man . . . ." The traditional definition of a "good man" was not affected by whether that man abused his wife--a purely private and personal matter.

When Lewis Hale strays in describing his discovery of the dead John Wright by adding, "I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John. . .," he is limited by the county attorney to "just what happened." Such an attitude was displayed later in this century by another symbol of law and order, the television character Sergeant Joe Friday, who limited women with "Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts." But the county attorney's narrow view of the facts causes him to cut off a witness who would have shed light on motive--the key element in the case.

Throughout the tale, the county attorney takes down evidence in a notebook with a pencil. The other characters realize that whatever was written down and preserved as evidence could be used against Minnie Wright. "Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too." Mr. Hale starts to describe Minnie Wright as looking "scared," but "at the sound of a moving pencil" he changes his mind. This may be a reference to one of the most famous verses of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, a work popular at that time.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

That Mr. Wright "died of a rope round his neck" is clear; the method of killing is not clear. There are references to knotting the rope, to "slippin' that rope under his neck," to "choking the life out of him," but the method of killing is described as "clumsy," as "strange." In Trifles, it is described as a "funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like that." The sense one gets is of a legal execution by hanging; of choking the life out of John Wright in retribution for his symbolically choking the life out of Minnie Foster Wright. The hanging could have been accomplished by throwing a rope over a rafter, slipping the noose under his head, and then pulling him up to hang. This method would have provided the leverage for Minnie Wright to surprise John Wright and yet stay out of his reach.

The sheriff and county attorney are suspicious of Minnie Wright's story that she didn't wake up, because she was sleeping in bed with her husband when he was strangled. She explained "but I was on the inside." This is yet another reference to the position of women in society; on the inside is the personal, private sphere as opposed to the political, public sphere. The women are inside the kitchen while the men look for a motive for the killing, "something to show anger--or sudden feeling," in the bedroom, the barn, and outside the house. They do not look carefully in the kitchen, dismissing it with, "nothing here but kitchen things."

Both the men and women know that the two sexes operate differently, and they are uncertain of each other. The men disdain the women's concern for "trifles," for the tasks left undone. However, they sense that they might not have noticed something in the kitchen and worry about leaving the women there alone. However, the sheriff contemptuously asks, "But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?" Even if they did, the county attorney describes Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, as "one of us," as "married to the law." As such, Mrs. Peters could be counted on to maintain the male value system and keep Martha Hale in line.

The women, left in the kitchen, wonder what prevented Minnie Foster Wright from finishing her tasks. They have a growing awareness of abuse. However, in her role as sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters says, "the law is the law." Martha Hale responds, "the law is the law--and a bad stove is a bad stove." This exchange echoes Antigone's call for respect to a higher law, as opposed to the positive law of Creon. In both cases manmade law does not encompass women's realities. The mundane, everyday essentials, the proper burial of the dead in one case and the preparation of food for the living in the other, are not adequately addressed or barely acknowledged by the law.

The women find that Minnie Foster Wright, when interrupted, was sewing quilt pieces. The women quilt together the story of what really happened from bits and pieces, from trifles. The women find one uneven quilt piece that looks "as if she didn't know what she was about!" There is concern. "Their eyes met--something flashed to life, passed between them ... ." An unstated conspiracy to destroy evidence is born. Martha Hale then pulls out stitches "that are not sewed very good," and proceeds to "replace bad sewing with good."

The men dismiss the women's interest in the quilting as a trifle. However, the women wonder about the final covering that was to be made from the quilt pieces and whether "she was going to quilt it or just knot it?" This question leads the women to make the connection between the quilt and the method by which the husband was killed, strangulation with a knotted rope. The men never do.

Quilting and knotting, also called tying, are two different methods of holding the soft filler in place in the individual pieces that make up a quilt. Quilting is a more artistic, but time-consuming, method of in-and-out stitching. Knotting is a simple, quick, single stitch. That Minnie Wright was going to knot rather than quilt the individual pieces is symbolic both of the joyless, spartan life Mr. Wright had forced on her and her method of killing him. The story ends with the county attorney facetiously asking about the quilt and Martha Hale responding that Minnie Foster Wright was going to "knot it, Mr. Henderson."

The quilt was a log cabin design, with a red patch at the center symbolizing a lighted hearth and the surrounding strips the "logs" of the cabin. From ancient times, the hearth was the exclusive domain of the woman of the house. But Minnie Wright's hearth was a cold, bad stove.

The women find a bird cage with a broken door; it looks as if someone had been "rough with it." The symbolism is again clear. Minnie Foster "was kind of like a bird herself." She sang in the church choir as a young girl 20 years before, but Mr. Wright had been rough with her, at least emotionally if not physically. When the women open her sewing basket to take her quilt pieces and sewing things to her in jail, they find a dead bird with a broken neck wrapped in a piece of silk inside a pretty box. Martha Hale knew "Wright wouldn't like the bird ... a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too."

There is an increasing sense of solidarity between the women; a recognition of shared experiences. "And then again the eyes of the two women met--this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met." Mrs. Peters recalls that when she was a girl a boy had killed her kitten with a hatchet: "If they hadn't held me back I would have . . . hurt him." Mrs. Hale concludes: "We all go through the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't--why do you and I understand? Why do we know--what we know this minute?"

A value system based on concern, fear, intervention, and care drives the women. Their fear includes fear of psychological and physical harm to themselves and others but also fear they will fail to act to protect themselves or others. Martha Hale fears she let Minnie Foster "die for lack of life." She should have taken the initiative and intervened earlier; she should not have passively allowed abuse to occur and continue. She cries, "Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while! . . . That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?"

The women exhibit the same kind of uneasiness and uncertainty that the men had earlier exhibited as to whether the two sexes would see the same facts and draw the same conclusions. Mrs. Peters feels the men would laugh at their concern about the dead canary, but Martha Hale is not so sure. "Maybe they would, . . . maybe they wouldn't." Mrs. Peters admits, "it seems kind of sneaking; locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!" When the county attorney wonders what happened to the canary, Martha Hale lies, "We think the cat got it." Mrs. Peters supports her even though both women know there is no cat. When the men later return to the kitchen, Mrs. Peters tries to hide the dead canary in her handbag, but it doesn't fit. Martha Hale stuffs it in the pocket of her coat. The unstated conspiracy between the two women is now complete. Ultimately, the members of the audience join in the conspiracy when they applaud at the end of the play.

The dead canary is central to Susan Glaspell's story and to the reality of women's lives. The image of a bird in a cage has long been used as a symbol of the constraints that surround the lives of women. For the pioneer farm wife left at home every day, the canary in the cage simultaneously symbolized both the constraints on her life and the only light, color, and song in her life.

Farm men, like Lewis Hale, could regularly travel to town to sell crops or pick up needed supplies. One of the few public social opportunities for a farm woman came from belonging to a Ladies Aid Society, a women's group sponsored by a church which met regularly to sew and quilt to raise money for charitable causes. In Trifles, Martha Hale says of Minnie, "She didn't even belong to the Ladies Aid." Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters provide their own brand of "ladies aid" for Minnie Wright.

It is never openly stated that Minnie Foster Wright was an abused wife or, if abused, whether the abuse was emotional or physical. It is never openly stated that Minnie Foster Wright was pushed too far by her husband's abuse and her complete isolation. Mr. Hale refers to her as looking "queer," "as if she didn't know what she was going to do next." "And kind of-done up." The rate of insanity of farm women in rural areas was extensively discussed in the late Nineteenth Century. But the women never consider Minnie "queer." They uncover evidence of the abuse that permeated Minnie Foster Wright's life and led her to kill her husband. They destroy evidence, "replace bad sewing with good;" lie about evidence, "we think the cat got it;" and conceal evidence, the final hiding of the dead canary. The women see different facts and believe in different laws than the men.

It is not clear whether the women found Minnie Foster Wright not guilty of any crime in light of all the facts or whether they believed a fair trial was not possible under the law as it then existed. If the latter, it is not clear whether that was because no women would have been on the jury or because existing man-made law could not result in justice for an abused woman. Avoiding the trial would prevent harm; it would free Minnie Foster Wright and avoid exposing John Wright as an abuser, an exposure that would not help Minnie.