Symbolic realism in Susan Glaspell's 'Trifles' (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: Susan Glaspell's (1876-1948) literary career increased in significance when she and her husband George Cram Cook moved to their summer residence in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1915. They founded the Provincetown Players, a group of dramatists who were about to change the development of American literature considerably. Against the more commercial and conventional Broadway plays, they shifted, as a part of the "'little theatre' movement," the stage into a fisher's house and performed experimental plays. One of these plays was Trifles, Susan Glaspell's most reputed dramatic piece, which was first produced in 1916 and published in 1920. Her "first solo one-act play" is based on the Hossack's case, a real murder incident in Iowa on December 2, 1900 when she was a news reporter. Her reflection of this incident deals with an investigation process which takes place in the farmhouse of the murdered John Wright and his imprisoned wife Minnie. The officials, Mr. Peters (the Sheriff), the County Attorney and the neighbour Mr. Hale, search for evidences in this house to convict Minnie of the murder. At the same time, the Sheriff's and Mr. Hale's wives, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, are supposed to collect clothes for Minnie. While they are in the kitchen, they encounter the important evidences to draw conclusions of Minnie's miserable life, her deed and, hence, take the opportunity to influence the case by concealing the most crucial evidence from the men.
The play is innovative, among other things, in the respect that the main characters are absent and that Glaspell, as a consequence, creates a second explanatory level by means of symbols underneath the plot surface. This level circumscribes in detail Minnie's misery and the reasons for killing her husband. By the same means Glaspell also generally criticizes the traditional gender roles by empowering the female characters and undercutting male authority.