Glaspell's Trifles

Last semester I read Susan Glaspell’s play, “Trifles,” in a theater class. I found the play interesting but read it differently than Elaine Hedges did as she explains in her article “Small things reconsidered: Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury Of Her Peers”.” “A Jury Of Her Peers” is the story version of the play “Trifles.” My interpretation of the play was that it was simply a murder mystery in which two women concealed some incriminating evidence from the sheriff so as to keep a friend out of prison. Hedges looks much deeper into “Trifles” and provides, what I believe to be, some very valid points.
Hedges feels that the title of the play refers to clues that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters use to solve the mystery of the murder of John Wright. They include a soiled roller towel, a broken stove, a cracked jar of preservatives, and an erratically stitched quilt block. It is by decoding these “Trifles,” which the men ignore, that the two women not only solve...