Trifles Summary & Analysis

The play establishes its themes in its opening moments. The play examines the relationships between husbands and wives, particularly a marriage that ended in murder. The setting, a messy kitchen, reflects this. The women stand together, highlighting both the way they have been pushed together by their male-dominated society but also, possibly, their loyalty to each other over their husbands, a topic explored in the play.

Lewis Hale’s account establishes the dynamic between men and women in the world of the play. The men are concerned with the business of finding evidence, and George Henderson is established as the man in charge in the investigation. Mr. Hale’s account shows the value placed on the word of a man. His testimony will not be questioned.

The irony of the request that brought Mr. Hale to the Wrights’ house is revealed later in the play. Minnie Wright was starved for company, for the voice of any other living thing. Mr. Hale hoped to install a telephone, an object that could keep her in touch with others and combat loneliness. But he was too late, an example of situational irony. The way that John was murdered—strangled by a rope—becomes critical later in the play as the characters search for a motive for murder.

Mr. Hale’s account of Minnie’s response to her husband’s death casts her as suspicious. Her statement that she didn’t wake up when her husband was killed seems nearly impossible. Her laughter and her fearful look are also treated as suspicious behavior. The men make various assumptions about women throughout this play. One assumption is that Minnie is guilty and they try to prove this, rather than try to understand her situation and her emotions. The men are looking for facts, not context.

The men repeatedly dismiss things as beneath their notice if they are things such as the canning jars of fruit that are, in their opinions, women’s concerns. The men never recognize that they have forced the women to be concerned about these things, by not allowing them to be concerned about anything else. The men’s dismissal reflects a larger mindset of devaluing women and their opinions and interests in general. Ironically, this dismissal ultimately causes the men to overlook the very evidence they seek.

Mrs. Hale’s support of Minnie is an early example of the empathy the women feel for each other, which results in loyalty. Mrs. Hale knows how difficult it is to run a farmhouse, but Mr. Henderson does not. Further, while Henderson dismisses women’s things as unimportant, he still feels the right and the need to judge women in their performance. Mrs. Hale sees the injustice of this (likely having experienced it herself), and so she defends Minnie against Mr. Henderson’ judgment. The women are united by their common experiences and loyal to each other because the men do not even try to understand their situation.

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have slightly differing perspectives on the way the men treatment them. Mrs. Hale is more critical of the men’s judgment of Minnie, whereas Mrs. Peters, as she does several other times in the play, tries to explain or dismiss the men’s behavior as them doing their duty. She conforms more strongly than Mrs. Hale to the expected gender roles, and accepts more fully the idea that the men’s duty is of primary importance — that the men themselves are more important than women.

The details of Minnie Wright’s house reveal much about her relationship with her husband, as well as the way her marriage restricted her joy, her possessions, and isolated her. The men are blind to, and completely uncaring about, all of this contextual understanding. The apron Minnie’s wants shows that she is unable to let go of her assigned responsibilities as a woman, despite the situation.

Through Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters’ discussion, the audience or reader is allowed to see the seriousness of Minnie’s situation. The discussion of a motive foreshadows the evidence the women will find, as well as establishes the importance of the evidence that they ultimately choose to conceal.

The men’s rebuke for the women’s focus on the quilt reinforces the ideas established through the previous scene of Mr. Henderson’s criticism of Minnie’s housekeeping: the men dismiss and laugh at the women, Mrs. Hale is resentful of this, and Mrs. Peters tries to excuse the men for their unkind treatment. Mrs. Hale’s act of re-sewing the quilt shows both how Minnie was in some kind of emotional distress and that Mrs. Hale is willing to conceal aspects of Minnie’s situation from the men.

The discovery of the birdcage introduces the concepts of imprisonment and isolation into the play. Although the bird is missing, the presence of a cage connects to Minnie’s situation, isolated as she was in her husband’s house. The women’s discussion of the cat foreshadows the grisly fate of the bird, as both assume it met a sudden end – though the evidence suggests it wasn’t a cat that killed it.

Mrs. Hale’s guilt over not visiting Minnie shows that she understands, to some extent, Minnie’s loneliness – even that she knew of Minnie’s loneliness before these events – but that she put her own life and husband before trying to help Minnie, before showing loyalty to another woman, and now blames herself for those choices. That John Wright is characterized as “a good man” demonstrates the standards by which society judged a man. These standards did not include or consider kindness to one’s wife. And these societal standards are so ingrained that even the two women accept them.

Note how a woman is “transformed” by marriage: she takes on her husband’s name. While symbolic, the play suggests that marriage really does transform a woman, just as Minnie’s spirit and happiness were crushed by life with Wright. And as someone who essentially belonged to her husband (as her changed name indicated), Minnie was trapped, like the bird in the cage.

The dead bird is the evidence that explains Minnie’s motive. Wright killed her bird – her only companion in her loneliness—and she killed him in return. More broadly, though, Mrs. Hale sees instantly that the dead bird is more than mere evidence of motive: it also shows the pattern of emotional abuse Minnie endured at Wright’s hands. She instinctively hides the bird from the men (who for their part are still mocking the women for their interest in the quilt), because she knows they will see it only as evidence of motive rather than evidence of abuse, and because in light of what she now knows she feels a stronger loyalty to Minnie than to the men.

Mrs. Peters is changed by the discovery of the dead bird from the timid woman she was into a woman willing to oppose her husband. This change is presented through her story about her kitten, which shows that she too has suffered at the hands of men and identifies with Minnie’s pain and rage. The women’s comments about children again highlight the roles into which women were forced, and the way that the women’s lives are entirely dependent on the domestic sphere.

Despite Mrs. Peter’s emotional reflections, she still feels a responsibility to the law. Mrs. Hale, on the other hand, recognizes that the law, administered as it is by men, is inadequate to punish the many crimes associated with gender inequality. She universalizes Minnie’s story, she sees it as just an extreme version of what she and all women have experienced. Her desire to protect Minnie, marked by her decision not to tell Minnie about the broken jars, comes from this connection.

The overheard conversation of the men reemphasizes the importance of what the women have found: the one remaining piece of evidence. Mr. Henderson’s decision to trust Mrs. Peters is an act of further belittlement: he does not think her capable of deception, and he believes her subject to the will of her husband, and therefore the law. He sees her, essentially, as belonging to her husband. But of course that is exactly the sort of thinking that ultimately led Minnie to murder her husband.

The women conceal the dead bird in their final unified act of defiance against the control of their husbands and the law that is made and regulated by men. The metaphor of the knotted quilt demonstrates the women’s certainty that Minnie killed her husband by strangulation, an act suggested by the term “to knot.” The men, meanwhile, still see the quilt as just a “trifle” and don’t at all get the significance of what the women are saying. The women have rebelled, in a small way, against the men and the male-dominated society in which they live. The men remain blind.