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Gender Roles Past & Present

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Submitted By danibellepatric
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Pages 7
Danielle Weatherspoon
Professor Robertson
English 1102, Composition and Modern English II
30 March, 2014

Gender Roles Past & Present

Both Fences and Trifles are plays concerning the difficulties of interactions between men and women. Glaspell's Trifles uses a murder mystery to portray a soured relationship between a husband and wife. One of the difficulties is that men and women have different interests and therefore take significance from different things. "While the men importantly bumble about trying to discover a motive, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale solve the case right under their dull noses.” (3) Throughout Trifles you are shown how little things add up to big things when small unnoticed facts slip by the Sheriff, the County Attorney and Mr. Hale. Meanwhile the women discover critical evidence. They determine that Minnie Wright, after social abandonment and a silent death, was likely provoked to kill her husband. Although Mrs. Wright says she was asleep at the time of her husband's death, the women find clues in the way that she kept her kitchen and are able to follow her thinking and conclude otherwise. The men only note that it the house is not well kept.
The lack of communication and great difference in areas of concern show the men and women of Trifles completely different views of the matter at hand. In the kitchen pantry, the women can remember what it was like for themselves to have picked and preserved their fruit; and understood why Mrs. Wright may be worried. The men show a certain disdain for this mishap and are simply inconvenienced by the mess of the broken jars. The entire process of looking for a motive is mainly because the attorney feels the jury will go easy on a woman. Trifles was written in 1916 when it was not common for people to have a home telephone and women still hand-stitched quilts. In the time period of this

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