Shakia Epps
Mrs. Heuisler
English 152
14 November 2013
Women Are Underestimated
The sheriff Henry Peters and the county attorney George Henderson arrive with Lewis Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Hale at John Wright's house, where Wright was murder. The cause of Mr. Wright’s death was by being strangled with a rope. The men belittle the women for worrying about irrelevant things such as preserve fruits frozen and broken, dirty towel, quilting with uneven stitches, broken birdcage and dead canary instead of useful evidence for the case. After looking around the house, the women found a quilt and decide to bring it with them. Also, they found a dead bird in a box in Mrs. Wright's sewing basket while they were searching for materials for the quilt. The bird was strangled and killed the same way as John Wright. Although Mrs. Peters is hesitant to disobey the men, who are only following the law, she and Mrs. Hale decide to hide the evidence, which will leave the men unable to find any sealing evidence to pin the case on Mrs. Wright. In Trifles by Susan Glaspell, the play reveals a society that revolves around masculine power but the women outsmarted the men with their sensitivity to another woman dilemma.
Women pay more attention to the little things that may lead to the solving of a bigger problem than guys who look at the obvious. Lewis Hale utters, "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles" (1067), this is odd because the women found the evidence, and the men didn't. The men were saying things about Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters while the women were examining the quilt. The men were saying things like, "They want to know if she was going to quilt it or knot it" (1070). Since the women concerned themselves with what the men thought was unimportant or of little value, they found the evidence that the men were looking for which was ironic. Mrs. Hale states “Well, I don't think she did. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit” (1069). Prior to their discovery of the quilt, the birdcage, and eventually the canary, Mrs. Peters thinks Mrs. Wright actually didn’t commit the crime, but Mrs. Hale states her definite opinion that Mrs. Wright is innocent, with the implication that no one so focused on trifles such as her fruit preserves and her apron could be guilty in which they were wrong. In short, the reality and association of all these ideas lead the observer to sense the struggle between men and women at the growth of the play, between different ways to overlook problems, diverse behavioral arrays and focus on different things, in precise trifles.

Work Cited
Glaspell, Susan. “Trifles.” Literature: A Pocket Anthology. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2008. 1063-1076. Print.