Trifles

Wow. Where has this been hiding? I can’t believe I haven’t read this play before. It was fantastic; so simple and spare, yet it said so many things. I think this play touched me because I am a bit of a homebody, and I have jars of fruit on my shelves, I make bread, and I sew- all that “old-lady stuff”. No, my husband doesn’t terrorize me, which is lucky for him. I liked this story and the way women made short work of figuring out what took place in the unhappy house, while the men marched around, criticizing the housewife’s housekeeping and making fun of the women’s “worrying over trifles”. It was their taking care of the “trifles”, the little details of the household and the womanly chores, that helped them understand Mrs. Wright’s motive for killing her husband. The men would never understand that a woman who could take such care with a complicated quilt would never randomly kill someone. A woman who took great pains to put up summer fruit and make fresh bread would never plan a murder, leaving her house in disarray for others to find. Only extreme circumstance could bring someone to murder, and the women stumbled across it. While murder cannot be condoned, the women felt like they were justified in hiding the box that held the dead bird, the motive for the crime. In their eyes, not only was Mr. Wright guilty of taking away the life of his wife’s bird, he also took away her life, keeping her away from other people, taking her youth away, keeping her trapped in a cage just like the bird he eventually killed. They felt guilty for not helping her, reaching out, and maybe in some way, they felt like they were making up for their own crimes by helping her.