ears ago young Minnie Foster "used to wear pretty clothes and be lively"; that Mrs. Hale hasn't visited the cheerless Wrights, mainly because Mr. Wright was so dour (Glaspell). That was then; this is now, and Mrs. Wright waits in jail to see whether she will be charged.
The theme of justifiable homicide arises in the context of the women's discussion of the Wrights and their fuss and bother over the household "trifles." They begin to notice things that housewives notice all the time around their own houses and around the houses of other housewives--how clean or out of place things are, what she was going to cook, what household projects she was working on. Ben-Zvi (141f) characterizes what they notice, the minutiae of housekeeping, as circumstantial evidence, not only of the crime of murder but also of the crime of wife abuse. The accretion of manifestly trivial information about what occupied Mrs. Wright around the house, more exactly how she was living, day to day, tells the story of what Angel (230) describes as "an abused wife who kills her abusive husband."
And she gets away with it. That is because of what the women in the kitchen do about circumstantial evidence that doubles as proof of the crime against Mrs. Wright and what the play suggests, as its main argument, is not a crime at all but instead a case of justifiable homicide. Ben-Zvi (141) and Angel (252ff) both see in Trifles a portrait of oppression and abuse. From real-life, modern-day cases showing that women physically abused by intimates are more likely to retaliate physically, Angel infers that Mrs. Wright
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