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Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles (1916) presents a murder mystery in which a farm owner, John Wright, has been killed presumably by his wife Minnie Wright. The narrative, however, deviates from typical whodunnit stories because no single protagonist claims the leading role and the case itself is not completely resolved at the end. Instead, accompanying the police search around the farmhouse, the two female characters, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, recognize that Mrs. Wright has endured a life of extreme loneliness enforced by her oppressive husband. The women unwittingly find a dead canary at the kitchen from which they surmise that Mrs. Wright strangled Mr. Wright as an act of revenge. Nevertheless, the ending does not show us how the ordinary housewife was able to execute such a skillful murder and why she keeps silence about her vengeance on patriarchal violence. A prevailing interpretation of Trifles holds that housewives themselves the women are able to read Mrs. Wright’s kitchen chores, which further enables them to penetrate her troubled marriage life. In this view the questions concerning the narrative closure and characterization hardly stand out: instead, attention is drawn to the possibility of truth acquisition depending on gender differences in communication. Feminist criticism claims that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters instantiate the way of women’s interaction based on empathy and mutual understanding whereas men are enslaved to logic and hierarchy. In short, the distinctive modes of communication intrinsic to the two genders determine which side is capable of obtaining the truth of the murder mystery. This essay challenges the dualistic approach, which links gender dichotomy in mode of communication to obtainability of truth, for simplifying the play’s narrative intentions. The communicational disparities between men and women and their approachability to truth make a circular logic, blocking us from seeing multiple aspects of the play’s narrative. If we question Mrs. Wright’s strangling of her husband and her genuine motive of killing, the case gets re-wrapped in mystery. In such case, which group of the characters solves the riddle becomes a secondary issue. Furthermore, the different modes of gender communication solicit analysis in terms of narrative effect; not of truth effect. This study proposes the term communication model to explain the underlying mechanism of the dominant interpretive scheme of Trifles. The communication model hypothesizes the essential communicational gap between the two sexes and suggests that the narrative of Trifles progresses teleologically to the women’s final detection of the truth. Then it proposes cognitive model as an alternative to the communication model. Not positing a priori sexual disparities in communicative ability, the cognitive model attends to interpretive schemata which the characters across gender mobilize to meet their goals and self-interests in the given situation. That way, the cognitive model implies that each character of the play builds constructive truth, rather than finding objective truth. The constructive truth obtained by the characters is to mediate the play on the stage and the audiences. Therefore, the cognitive model also serves to interrogate the potential spectatorship that Trifles might have aimed to achieve.
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Susan Glaspell, Trifles, communication model, cognitivism
