This research examines the theme of justifiable homicide as the experience of finding justice in Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles. The research will set forth the pattern of ideas in the work and then discuss the means by which it illustrates the emergence of justice.
The action of Trifles takes place in the winter of 1916 and is confined to the kitchen of a farmer's wife. It takes place in the aftermath of the peculiar strangling death of the farmer. The wife of the sheriff, Mrs. Peters, and a friend of hers, Mrs. Hale, whose husband discovered the body, are gathering personal things for the farmer's wife, who is being held in jail. While Sheriff Peters, the county attorney, and Mr. Hale set about looking through the house and barn to search for evidence that might be useful in a trial, the women busy themselves in the kitchen. The investigation is taking place because of the odd story that the farmer's wife, Mrs. Wright, told about waking up in bed beside the body of her rope-strangled husband. "I didn't wake up," Hale says Mrs. Wright explained with little emotion. "I sleep sound."
Finding her explanation unsatisfactory, the sheriff has arrested Mrs. Wright, and the county attorney, with a sneer at the untidy kitchen and at Mrs. Wright's concern that her fruit preserves might have frozen, remarks that she'll "have something more serious than preserves to worry about" (Glaspell). Off the men go to solve the mystery and nail the husband-killer, leaving Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to dispose of the ruined fruit, tidy the kitchen, and collect some personal items for Mrs. Wright. Their conversation as they do so reveals that the Wrights were not a happy couple; that Mrs. Minnie Wright's formerly sunny disposition as a young girl had degenerated over the years; that Mr. Wright was "so close" that his wife went about in shabby clothing, too embarrassed to be seen in public or go to practice in the church choir any more; that 30 y...