Hale lays her hand over the broken birdcage and replies “His neck. Killing a man while he slept, slipping a rope around his neck that choked the life out of him,” Mrs. When she struggles to pull herself back round, she says, “It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. She covers her face in anguish for a moment and says, “If they hadn’t held me back, I would have-hurt him.” Her voice falters in the retelling. Peters recalls, in a whisper, the time a boy murdered her pet kitten with a hatchet. When they talk now it is in the manner of feeling their way over strange ground, as if afraid of what they are saying, but as if they cannot help saying it. Sit there not looking at one another, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. At this point, the women begin to realize that Minnie has killed her husband, and this little bird was her motive. The bird’s neck has been broken it was obviously deliberately killed. Alas, the bird has somehow been lost-or so they think-until they discover its small body in Minnie’s sewing basket, wrapped in a piece of pink silk, like a precious object. They talk about how lonely she must have been, and how a bird might have brought her company. When they find the birdcage with its broken door, they wonder about why Minnie might have had a bird and what could have happened to it. They lift up Minnie’s shabby clothes and note that Minnie didn’t belong to any social clubs, or ever go out, possibly because she had nothing nice to wear. They see the silent side of life that the men are oblivious to, the “hard work in hot weather” that makes up so much of a farmer’s wife’s daily routine. Hale says “ feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather.” The amount of time and effort required to make fruit preserves has been wasted, and both Mrs. They’re sorry about the frozen jam, in particular Mrs. They move restlessly around the room, picking up and putting down objects and remarking on them. When the men troop upstairs to investigate the murder scene, Mrs. Hale retorts, “Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either. Henderson, says that Minnie seems to lack “the homemaking instinct,” Mrs. They feel sorry for her and point out that her life must have been both hard and lonely. The stage direction shows them answering the men “stiffly” when their husbands try to cajole them into joining in with insulting Minnie Wright. The women, by contrast, literally “move a little closer together” in solidarity against the men and “do not unbend” when the men try to make light of the situation. They are disrespectful to and dismissive of Minnie throughout the play, and it becomes clear that her dead husband, John Wright, treated her the same way. Hale says, “women are used to worrying about trifles.” The men’s actions are careless-rummaging through the cupboards, disturbing objects on the table, increasing the mess-and they blame the absent Minnie in a casually cruel way. Peters notes that Minnie was worried her jam would freeze, Mr. The men in the play blame the lady of the house, Minnie Wright, for the state of the place, saying she clearly isn’t “much of a housekeeper.” When Mrs. Hale notes, “It never seemed a very cheerful place.” This is not a nice place to live, and the people who lived here could not have been happy. The scene description states that the kitchen is “gloomy the walls covered with a faded wall paper.” The stove is “old-fashioned,” the window “uncurtained,” the rocking chair “old,” and the kitchen table “unpainted.” The whole kitchen is full of “signs of incompleted work.” As soon as the characters enter the scene, they begin remarking on how cold the house is-so cold, jars of jam preserves have frozen and burst inside the cupboards. It is set in a shabby farmhouse in midwinter. Glaspell’s Trifles is the story of a woman who murders her husband. While it’s not possible to fully appreciate the spectacle of a play when reading it as a text, it is still possible to glean a sense of the intended spectacle from the scene settings and the stage directions. All sensory elements of the drama fall under the heading of “spectacle,” including costumes, settings, music, and the movements and voices of the actors on stage. Enjoy eNotes ad-free and cancel anytime.Īristotle, in his Poetics, defines “spectacle” as one of the six components of tragedy. Start your subscription to unlock this answer and thousands more. While it’s not possible to fully appreciate the… Aristotle, in his Poetics, defines “spectacle” as one of the six components of tragedy.
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