Rebekah C., Blog Post: "Nothin here but kitchen things"

Our discussion yesterday in class about Trifles was really illuminating for me. Everyone picked up on something different in the play, and we were able to quite easily analyze the incredible subtext and subtlety that Glaspell included in the play. Part of me wonders what would have been possible for the discussion if we had some dudes in the class, but a very small part-- the rest of me is very pleased that it is just us.

This brings me to my next point, which doesn't seem at first to have much to do with domestic violence or abuse, but I think it is indicative of a certain mentality that most all of us have probably encountered.

Hale, the man who found Mrs. Wright in her home with her husband dead upstairs, says "Well, women are used to worrying about trifles", dismissing the seemingly queer preoccupation the two women have with Mrs. Wright's preserves. He criticizes Mrs. Wright's housework, and this again rouses a little protectionism from the other women, who point out the endlessness of these chores and mention that Mr Wright would have kept the place gloomy with his mere presence. However, of course, their grumblings are hardly acknowledged by the men. Both men and women are "loyal to their sex" in this play. In this play, men and women comingle but truly inhabit different worlds.
It becomes obvious while the women talk the the patterns and routines of the day are psychologically demanding, to say the least, when you are married to a working man. The men in the story leave the home to work during the day, seemingly with one another's company, loading and farming and transporting potatoes. They are initiated into the world of commerce simply by being men, and are therefore in possession of personal agency and freedom. The men go out into the world and are citizens of the world. While they do this, their wives stay home. "Not having children makes less work-- but it makes a quiet house, and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did come in" (pg. 987). Would it be possible for any person to retain a degree of mental health in such a desolate setting? Imagine the helplessness.
Women, in Susan Glaspell's play, are confined and isolated from not only each other, but from the rest of the world. Desperate for human warmth and connection, they reach out to one another. I believe the very compassionate act of sending Minnie Foster a jar of her preserves to comfort her in her jail cell is metaphoric of the ways that women are forced to forge connections with one another in creative ways, and learn to communicate in more subtle ways than men.
 I think that though women in our society are indeed more free, we are still not raised to be competetive, and we are still uneasy being outspoken. As female students, I think that we encounter more hardships and socially perplexing situations because college is still a primarily male institution, it has only been a few decades that women have really been encouraged to go. And when we do go, we are not already quite as familiar or comfortable with concepts of intellectual competition, like men are. This makes it easy for them to find our weaknesses, and attest to our suitability for other activities, like the men in Trifles.