Theme of Justifiable Homicide in "Trifles"

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

. . .
y do not have access to, it is not an overstatement to say that the specifics of evidence that emerge in the context of the play illustrate such lack of access and make a case for the justice of letting Mrs. Wright go free. Angel explains (235) that the most Mrs. Wright could credibly expect from an trial would be either a mistrial based on a hung jury or jury nullification, which is a verdict that occurs "when the law as explained to them by a trial judge does not comport with their moral beliefs. Jurors simply acquit in spite of evidence supporting a conviction." Whereas an all-male jury would doubtless interpret such evidence as the strangled bird as motive for murder, not least because it would explain (in a perverse and sordid way) why Mr. Wright was strangled with a rope and not shot with the gun that was in the house, the women in the kitchen who become Mrs. Wright's de facto jury interpret it differently. It may not be inaccurate to suggest that the evidence can be interpreted as the basis for jury nullification, but the trouble with that interpretation is that it would require of the men on any trial jury to find their moral beliefs outraged by Mr. Wright's crime on one hand, and to acknowledge more generally male agency
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2011
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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