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Literary Devices
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis:
The text of Trifles is comprised almost entirely of dialogue. Glaspell uses dialect to convey key elements of her characters’ backgrounds, personalities, and context. The play is set in a rural farmhouse in the Midwest and features qualities of regional dialects common to the Midwest, including contractions of words and unusual grammatical structures. One example occurs when Mr. Hale is describing his conversation with Minnie Wright at the beginning of the play:
"How do, Mrs. Wright, it's cold ain't it?"
Mr. Hale uses the contraction “ain’t it” in the place of “is it not,” a display of typically southern or midwestern syntax. He also says “how do” rather than “how do you do,” a distinctive greeting that similarly situates the speaker in the rural Midwest.
In this first scene, Mr. Hale also employs an unusual sentence structure when describing John Wright's relationship with his wife:
“I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—”
Here again, the syntactical structure contextualizes the Hales as rural farmers with limited formal education. This use of dialect allows Glaspell to depict her characters' background through their use of language and to deepen the setting of the play. Although the entire play takes place in one house and there is limited depiction of the surrounding town or environment, the place and time in which the action takes place is revealed through the characters' dialogue.
