The Spousal Abuse of Women in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the pioneering American female playwrights who evolved into visibility at the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the twentieth. She had celebrated in her personal and literary life the advent of the new woman striving to fulfill her dreams in a hostile and intensive world. Glaspell based her first dramatic play, Trifles, on an actual murder case she covered while working as a journalist.

Journal of College of Education for Women, 2020

Domestic violence, or as sometimes known as family abuse, is usually related to a domestic or local setting as in cohabitation or in marriage. It can take the forms of being physical, verbal, economic or emotional. Globally, most of the domestic violence is overwhelmingly directed to females as they tend to experience and receive severe forms of violence, most likely because they do not involve their intimate, or sometimes even non-intimate partners, in the process of mental and physical self-defense. Sometimes countries justify domestic violence directed to females, they may be legally permitted when the reasons behind it are related to issues of women's infidelity. Usually, the permission to violent acts is related to the level of gender equality postulated in these countries. Familial or domestic violence may progress when it is directed against any partner in society. In its evolution, domestic violence may develop different violent dynamics out of human choices. In Glaspell's play, domestic violence has led the hard-natured Mr. Wright to his death, a nature that is articulated to his wife as a fatal execution of her own freedom and humanity. The kitchen, a place which men consider trivial, holds the clues leading the female characters in the play to discover the identity of the murderer. This discovery causes, in the audience as well as in the female characters, a dilemma of judging the domestic violence executed by the murderer under the pressures of emasculated patriarchal culture overwhelming that closed society.

لارك

This paper examines the theme of feminism through focusing on the female bonding as a means of gaining power .In this paper I’ll prove that the America dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) makes a feminist leap as she portrays her female characters with an ample cunning to secretly and humbly triumph over male prejudice. She challenged those who believed that the United States offered freedom and equality by demonstrating that women were not treated equally since they were excluded from participating in the justice system except as defendants the underestimated power of woman in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) which is written in the early twentieth century but it transcends time periods and cultures.

Journal of Education and Science( U of Mosul), 2010

This paper is a feminist approach to Susan Glaspell's Trifles. It handles the marital discordance which results in misanthropy. Mrs. Wright in this play is a woman who falls victim to the suppression and marginalization of her husband, Mr. Wright. The hard-hearted husband destroys her human feelings out of neglect, a matter that ends in killing her husband. The subject is presented from a purely feminine perspective in that Mrs. Wright's character is fully revealed through the female characters' reactions. In fact, Trifles creates the impression that Glaspell is in full advocacy of women's right to reach self-fulfillment away from any form of social dictations. Matrimonial relationships must be compatible in order to enjoy a rather entertaining and continuous repose of mind.

Circles: Buff. Women's JL & Soc. Pol'y, 1997

Revista De Estudios Norteamericanos, 2000

Women ha ve been driven mad, «gas-lighted,» for centuries by the rcfutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male expericnce. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other; not to undermine each other's sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gasligbt each other. Adrienne Rich Su san Glaspell (1882-1948) was a famous dramatist and fiction writcr who published ten novels and more than forty short stories.1 Togetber with Gcorge Cram Cook. her husba nd, shc organized a group of Provincetown actors, known as the Provincetown Players. in 1915. who pcrformed one-act plays in a wharf theater and later in Greenwic h village, in Ncw York. Glaspell and Cook's productions were anticommercial and avant-garde and they fostered the first experimental drama in the United States. According to Barbara Ozieblo, their real achievement líes «in their

مجلة وادی النیل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانیة والاجتماعیة والتربویه

Trifles is a one-act play that premiered in 1916, which discusses social construction of women in a male-dominated society in the 1980s. It reflects patriarchal oppression exercised against women in an era that belittles women's right of independence and freedom. This paper puts into focus the submissive gender roles of women, paying special attention to the relationship between language and gender as major elements in forming female identity. This paper provides an analysis of the play which is inspired by sociolinguistics, language and gender, dealing with language as a social phenomenon that reflects differing uses of language based on individuals' gender differences. First, this paper will deal with the discussion of the relationship between gender and language in Susan Glaspell's Trifles. Second, it will explore the linguistic features used by women that reveal the oppressive gender roles of women at that time. It will shed light on gender differences in language use which perpetuate the subjugation of women.

Studies in Literature and Language, 2013

Rural American women usually appear as marginal characters in mainstream early twentieth century literature. Susan Glaspell, however, sought to represent the lives and hardships of the simple rural women residing in various regions in America and forgotten by society. In Trifles (1916) the characters were molded after real people residing in the American countryside and the protagonist resembles a real woman involved in a sensational murder case that Glaspell covered during her early days as a journalist. Consequently, most critics link the domestic murder to the playwright's ideals of advocating political rights for women. Moreover, the play written in 1916 preceding the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 is indicative of cultural transformations in American society. Critical opinion, however, varies and Trifles is often regarded as a one-act drama focusing on the individual hardships of women and therefore does not reach an apogee of a political play. However, the play's vivid description of the daily lives of rural women in America and their individual struggle with patriarchy emphasize the play's insistence on the importance of gaining political rights for women as a major theme. The present paper suggests that a reading of the political themes as relevant because the historical setting and the precise account of rural American women living in 1916 were accurately portrayed in the exposition.

Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi

Though Susan Glaspell's well-known one-act play Trifles (1916) has been predominantly framed by the themes of female condition at the turn of the twentieth-century United States, it is intrinsically built on the concepts of detection and crime. The dramatic text reveals a narrative tendency that keeps deferring the detection of a case of murder committed within the farmhouse of the Wright family. Against the backdrop of its social and cultural context, the play gives voice to its female characters in the inspection of the crime whereas the male characters fail to detect the motivation behind the murder. This article argues that Trifles can be construed as a feminist crime account whose language and structure are couched in a narrative of deferral. The play subtly illustrates that the story of investigation not only shakes the strict bounds of convention but it also divulges precariousness of social justice particularly for women in the early twentieth-century United States.

2015

In this research article, the researchers aim to explore the politics of homemaking and female autonomy in Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles through textual analysis. Radical feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett perceive domestic space and homemaking as patriarchal apparatuses in repressing female autonomy. It is undeniable that domestic space and the housewife’s duty of homemaking limit the potential of womanhood. However, to cast domestic space and homemaking as purely mechanics of oppression is also to enforce another kind of limitation on female autonomy. What we propose in this research is a rereading of the women and the domestic sphere in Trifles through Iris Marion Young’s theoretical framework of homemaking as a process toward female autonomy. To redefine the relationship between women and domestic sphere is to open another area of possibility in which patriarchy could be subverted through its own apparatus. Keywords: Domestic Space, Susan Glaspell, Tr...