Susan glaspell trifles gender roles Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Susan glaspell trifles gender roles - Essay Example In the patriarchal society, women’s issues were often considered of a marginal importance, the writer examines this with a view of highlighting the negative impact the subservience forced upon them. The play commences with a murder investigation after Mr. Wright is found strangled with a rope in his bedroom; his wife, Mrs Wright, who was alone with him is arrested and taken to jail as the main suspect. From her jail cell, she requests her three friends who are also wives of the investigating officers to fetch her apron and a shawl from her house; the women and their husbands go to the house, which the husbands ransack in search for evidence of the crime. On the other hand, the women go through Mrs Wrights personal belongings, men scorn the women’s actions, which they see as irrelevant and naive since they are going through â€Å"trifles†. However, the women ultimately discover the simple details and clues that the men in their many searches missed or ignored, thi s minor details end up providing the conclusive proof of Mr Wright’s crime. ... riticism of the fact that a woman’s identity is defined in relation to her connection with a man, her husband and not so much the role she plays as an autonomous human being. A man on the other hand is addressed by either name or title, conversely, men are viewed as complete wholes and their identity is tied to the important roles they play in society and they are unequivocally considered as more independent than women are. The women are homemakers, when they come to the house, it is primarily to fetch the belongings Mrs Wright had asked of them, thus to them the farmhouse was not just a crime scene but also a home. They sat in the kitchen, went through the drawers and took note of the broken glass and bread left on the counter; contrariwise, the men have come with the single-minded purpose of discovering evidence from a crime scene (O Neil). Their endeavor to find evidence is designed to be thorough, and centered completely on the crime not the facts that may have preceded it , they come looking for signs of a break in although they later discover the rope used to kill Mr Wright belonged to his house. Their technical and impersonal approach however brings out radically different results from the women’s, they were able to figure out she may have killed her husband but they did not know why. The women on examining the trifles however were able to come up with a logical explanation and discovered the woman had been quite disturbed before she committed the crime. Men’s tyrannical status is also explored in the description of my Wright who is described as a hard man; the women speculate that he did not like the birds singing although his wife did. This lead to his snapping its neck, the women notice that the manner in which the bird and the man died were not markedly