Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Full Analysis of “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell

At this point in the plot of the play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, another instance of men mocking women about their “trifles” emerges. The women are standing over Mrs. Wright’s pattern of a log cabin quilting project and wondering if she was going to knot or quilt it and the men laugh at this. However, what the men don’t realize is this “trifle” that they are thinking about, the quilt, reveals a very important piece of evidence. Most of the quilt discussed in “Trifles” (full analysis of play here) is very neat and perfect but all of a sudden there is a piece that is “all over the place” proving that Mrs. Wright was not her usual careful self. Mrs. Hale moves the stitching about to make it look better under the eye of her friend, who is more conservative and assured about the best intentions of the men, Mrs. Peters. As she looks for a piece of string the two women encounter a birdcage.

The birdcage is an important find in the play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell because although the women remember someone selling canaries, they don’t remember her having a bird or a cat that might have gotten to it but they do remember that in her younger days, as Minnie Foster, she used to sing like a pretty bird. They women look closer and see the hinge is bent like someone went at the cage. Before more about this is explored the women discuss how they should have come over to Mrs. Wright’s house more often, how without children and with a husband who always worked and was bad company when he was at home, it must have been lonely for her.

The women are getting ready to take the quilt with them and look for scissors and find a box. In it they find the bird with an obvious broken neck, like someone strangled it forcefully. At this point the County Attorney enters and asks (probably mocking them) if they Mrs. Wright planned on knotting or quilting it and they reply in one of the important quotes from “Trifles” by Susan Glasspell that “she was going to knot it” an obvious metaphor for the crime. In another metaphor, the Attorney asks about the bird, if a cat got it, which they reply was the case. The cat in this metaphor is Mr. Wright.

Mrs. Peters tells a short beginning of a story about a boy who took a hatchet to her kitten which alludes to the fact that she would understand how Mrs. Wright would feel if Mr. Wright killed her bird. They could understand how still and lonely it would be without the sound of a bird for comfort which prompts Mrs. Hale to say something about her baby that died and how it was the same feeling. They see themselves as guilt of a crime since they never came to see Minnie and they take the box with the bird. The men enter and say Mrs. Wright was, indeed, planning on knotting it.

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