From the very beginning, from the title itself, "Trifles," the play takes on an acerbic criticism of the world, the early Midwest, and its denizens, hardy farmers and townsfolk, around whom the plot unfolds.  Significance is attached to trifles in this play, but not everyone has sufficient acuity to see and judge them. 

Glaspell revisited the play in short story form, in "A Jury of her Peers," click on the link for a radio dramatization of the latter, an excellent  dramatization that is very close (after some small divergence at the beginning) to the play text of "Trifles."

The men are the authorities here, meeting out justice, applying strict logic and law, and searching for some sort of measurable cause or motive.  But they find nothing "but kitchen things" in their search of the premises, failing to realize that what answers there are, are in the domestic scene of this particular woman and the evidence therein of abusive behaviors and psychological trauma (979).  Early language diminishes the women and their role, from the practical concerns they have for the hard labor of their friend and neighbor when they worry about her preserves freezing and smashing, the Sheriff dismisses them with wonder, "Well, can you beat the women!  Held for murder and worryin´ about her preserves" (980), to the arrogant and patronising "women are used to worrying over trifles" which only serves to unite the women against the symbolic role and function of men -- suggested in the parenthetical stage direction "[the two women move a little closer together]" (980) so that ultimately Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are able to suppress the information that would convict Mrs. Wright, without the qualms that they might otherwise have felt.

The world of the play is a world of Them and Us: sharply polarised and irrevocably divided along gender stereotyped lines.  The women are drudges, marginalized and little more than functionaries, there at Mrs. Wright´s home merely to collect some things for her and put her affairs in order -- women´s work.  But it is in the performance of these domestic duties that the two women discover the trifles that reveal what there is knowable or discernible about Mrs. Wright´s apparent murder of her husband.  The men are blind to them, and that is, in part, symbolic of the great gulf that separates men and women in Glaspell´s play, and at the same time offers a rationalization and even a justification of sorts for the brutal murder that occurs before the curtain rises, and upon which the subsequent discovery dwells. Click here for commentary on the woman´s place in Glaspell´s Trifles.

There is a strong primitive association between Mrs. Wright and the canary that represents her narrow, caged-in life.  Her neighbors unravel the mystery of the murder intuitively and carefully, using precision and process, like the canning of fruit, or the making of a quilt.  The men of the play, representing institutional power and male authority, stomp noisily about the house (we hear their steps repeatedly in the stage directions) uncovering nothing.  The women on the other hand, get to the heart of the matter: revealing the unyielding harshness of the murder victim, a man "like a raw wind that gets to the bone," (984), imagining the life of their timid neighbor, "sweet and pretty...and fluttery" (984) in such severe company.  Click here for a discussion of symbol in the play (click on hypertext or scroll through to the end for the symbol analysis).

In quick summation they leap to the inevitable conclusion, one that is beyond male eyes, "Wright wouldn´t like the bird -- a thing that sang.  She used to sing.  He killed that too" (985).  And so it turns out that one murder followed another.  And in the minds of both women, even though Mrs. Peters is professedly "married to the law," the act becomes one of self-defense, or perhaps justifiable homicide; and the two women who know the truth tacitly agree not to utter it.