Triffles

“Generic Translation and Thematic Shift in Susan Glaspell's `Trifles' and `A Jury of Her Peers'”
By Leonard Mustazza
Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 489–96.
[In the essay below, Mustazza argues that in adapting Trifles to the short story form in "A Jury of Her Peers," Glaspell changed the focus from the elements of women's lives judged as trivial by men to women's lack of power in the American legal system.]
Commentators on Susan Glaspell's classic feminist short story, "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), and the one-act play from which it derives, Trifles (1916), have tended to regard the two works as essentially alike. And even those few who have noticed the changes that Glaspell made in the process of generic translation have done so only in passing. In his monograph on Glaspell, Arthur Waterman, who seems to have a higher regard for the story than for the play, suggests that the story is a "moving fictional experience" because of the progressive honin...