University of Baghdad

College of Arts
Department of English

An Ecofeminist Reading of Susan Glaspell’s

Trifles

Mushtaq Abdulhaleem Mohammed

Ph.D. Student (Litt.)

Nov. 2020
Introduction
Ecofeminism, the connection between women and nature, is one of
the recent literary theories that bring to the surface the harsh and unjust
treatment of feminist and environmental issues via males in male-
dominated societies. Hence, the present paper tackles Susan Glaspell’s
Trifles (1916) through the lens of Ecofeminism to illustrate how women
and nature are connected and oppressed by men directly and indirectly.
Ecofeminism was first coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in
her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort, (1974). Ecofeminism emphasizes
equality between genders, the power of intuition, awareness of
the environment, including animals and plants, and the relations between
women and nature (Warren).

Glaspell’s Trifles, a one-act play, is a murder mystery with only

seven characters, two of them never appear. It is about the murder of John
Wright, a farmer, by his wife, Minnie Wright. Hearing of the murder, the
county attorney, George Henderson, the local sheriff, Henry Peters, and
the neighbour, Lewis Hale enter the crime scene to identify the murderer.
Accompanied by their wives, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, the men look
around the place searching for clues, while the women discover evidence
in the wife’s “trifles”: baking, cleaning, and sewing (Galens 217).

Ironically, the title of the play refers to women’s concerns with

things, such as Minnie Wright’s canning jars of fruit, the quilt, and the dead
canary. These clues, which men arrogantly assume them “trifles,” are
appropriately used by women to understand others’ motives (Jabboury 7).
Blinded to see these items as significant, Mr. Hale satirically says: “Well,
women are used to worrying over trifles” (Bigsby 38).1 Symbolically
speaking, this is how men view women in a male-dominated society.

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 Françoise d’ Eaubonne, a founder of and theorist, asserts that
ecofeminism is a “warning that human beings cannot survive patriarchy’s
ecological consequences” (Glazebrook 12), whereas other ecofeminist
critics focus on the “reproduction and nurturing” functions of women and
Nature and the exploitation of women and Nature by men. Inter-
connectedness of human beings to Nature is one of the ecofeminist
practices. The oppression of women at the hands of men and the male’s
inferior looking upon the female as a fragile creature led to various
controversies among nations. Women must believe that there will be “no
liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis” within a male-
dominated society (ibid. 13).

Trifles: Interconnecting Women to Nature

Trifles starts with a messy kitchen in which there is no sense of life

due to Mrs. Wright’s imprisonment following the death of her husband. In
A Jury of Her Peers (1917), a subsequent short story, Glaspell describes
the Wrights’ place as: “It looked very lonesome this cold March morning.
It had always been a lonesome looking place. It was down in a hollow, and
the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees” (333). Such a
description, according to Neimneh and Halla, “suggests a rift in the relation
between a husband and his wife, and nature here mirrors the cold relation
of the Wrights” (6)

Looking for clues in the kitchen, the women find a bird-cage with a
broken door hinge and a dead canary, a reference to the violent suppression
of female identity. Mrs. Hale asserts that Mrs. Wright “used to sing real pretty
herself” (Trifles 42) like the canary. To figure the strained relationship
between the couple, Glaspell has employed a canary bird and made Mrs.
Wright emotionally attached to it against an austere husband. The death of
the bird not only indicates the spiritual or emotional death of the wife, Mrs.
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Wright, but it also hints at the alliance between women and exploited nature. In
addition, Glaspell thematizes caged birds to comment on the privations
imposed on women under patriarchy like silencing and marginalization
(Neimneh and Halla 6).

Accordingly, forcing women to the domestic issues in the house,

leaves a psychological negative effect on their characters, turning them into
helpless creatures who seek refuge in anything that can make up for their
loss. This is obvious in Mrs. Wright who lives a childless life in which the
caged canary and its singing are the only ways of survival. Mrs. Wright’s
pretty singing and energetic life have been replaced by silence and
unsympathetic life with the hardhearted husband who “choked the life out
him,” (Trifles 44) her pet bird, and ripped her to tears (Bazregarzadeh 12).

After finding, together with Mrs. Peters, the dead bird in Mrs.
Wright’s sewing box, Mrs. Hale emphasizes Mrs. Wright’s love of the bird
so she hides it in her little pretty box. Mrs. Hale, once more, brings the
Wrights’ childless life to the light to link the death of the bird to Mr. Wright
by saying, “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird—a thing that sang. She used
to sing. He killed that, too” (Trifles 44). In this respect, Shiva in “Women’s
Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation,” claims that

The marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity

go hand in hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchal
model of progress which pushes inexorably towards mono-cultures,
uniformity, and homogeneity. In this perverted logic of progress,
even conservation suffers (205).
Consequently, Mrs. Wright’s spiritual breakdown in her house compels her
to keep a canary without which life is “nothing,” “then a bird to sing to you,
it would be awful - still, after the bird was still” (Trifles 44).

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 Ecologically, the role of the bird is an icon of Nature, whose death
is the real motive for the murder in the play. Rural life on the farm is the
base of the play where women spend most of their lifetime doing farm
chores. Not only are women “more dependent on forest products” but they
also “suffer more than men as a consequence of environmental degradation
and destruction of forests” (Glazebrook 16).

Furthermore, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters’ agreement with each other
in the end is a symbol of “ecofeminist spiritualities” and “a tool for
surviving and overcoming patriarchy” (Glazebrook 19). It provides them
with the power to replace the “unhealthy, life-denying systems and
relationships” with “healthy, life-affirming” ones (ibid). The role of
women in the house and their interconnection with Nature account for their
survival in the gloomy masculine society (Bazregarzadeh 13).

In the same manner, Mrs. Wright’s worries about her preserves, and
the bird can be described from the ecofeminist angle as follows:

In ecofeminism, the fact of being a woman is understood to lie at the

base of one’s experience of ecological degradation; of one’s interests
in ecological protection, preservation, and reconstruction; and of
one’s “special” ecological consciousness (Sandilands 5).
As a woman, Mrs. Wright feels responsible for all that grant meaning to
life on the farm, i.e. the animals, the preserves, and the bird because
“women are considered the major providers of food, fuel, and water” in
farm life (Gaard 5); all of which are considered as trifles by men.

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters frequently refer to Mrs. Wright’s concern
over her preserves, reflecting on “all her hard work in the hot weather”
(Trifles 41). These recurrent images are indeed the sign of Mrs. Wright’s
lost identity and her longing for renewal (Bazregarzadeh 14).

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Conclusion

Examining Susan Glaspell’s Trifles from an ecofeminist perspective

proves that the play has inherently dealt with the oppression of women and
Nature by men, despite its tragic story on the surface. In Trifles, Susan
Glaspell attempts to liberate the tyrannized women and shed light on the
fact that human beings are neither masters nor slaves to Nature. The
implicit and explicit message is that almost all female characters through
their actions and reactions ask for their feelings to be considered by the
patriarchal world. Their concerns are more than domestic trifles. Glaspell
tries to silent the coldly authoritarian husband by the bird’s singing and to
warm the freezing weather by knitting and quilting.

All male characters in the play regard Minnie Wright’s belongings,

the apron, the preserves, and the bird as trifles but they are ways of survival.
What makes the ecofeminist examination of the play significant is that it
fulfills the task of breaking from “the dualisms and the ways in which
feminizing nature and naturalizing or animalizing women has served as
justification for the domination of women, animals, and the earth.”
(Sandilands 5).

Notes

1. Bigsby, Christopher WE, ed. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Cambridge

University Press, 1987. All subsequent quotations cited in the paper
are from this edition and referred to as Trifles and the page
number(s).

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