Friday, January 8, 2010

go go gadget virtual bookshelf/ "Trifles", by Susan Glaspell

I'm writing this outside in beautiful Bradenton, Florida, which is very near Sarasota. It's about 60 degrees outside, which I'm told is cold for the season. I remain skeptical.

I have a Shelfari. Shelfari is a website that allows you to sort of have a record on a screen in front of you of books you've read, as well as sharing your opinions of them with other people. Luckily, I have a blog for that second thing, but it's sort of nice to be able to take a look back and remember the impressions of things that I had as I read them.

This is a link to my Shefari:

http://www.shelfari.com/o1517943055


Many of my "book review"-esque posts will come from things that are listed on that site, so if you want to hear about any specific book listed there, you can comment and let me know.

I was paging through said virtual bookshelf today, looking for something cool to write about, and I hit on Trifles, which is a rather short one-act play by a lady named Susan Glaspell. Mrs. Glaspell was an influential founding member of the Provincetown Players, an at-first amateur literary/dramtatic company which spawned a couple of names that will no doubt be familiar to the quizbowlers/English majors/lofty educated types among you: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O'Neill both had their literary careers "launched" by the Provincetown Players, according to Wikipedia. They also did plays by already established but high quality authors, like Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, author of the incomparable drama of the Paris lesbian scene Nightwood. (Can you open Wikipedia for yourself if you're curious about who they are? I think you can.)

So anyway, Trifles itself is a one-act play. The plot of it is relatively simple. A woman, driven mad by her terribly restricting marriage, kills her husband, but no one can figure out who's done it, or why. The sheriff, a man from the town, and their respective wives show up on the scene of the crime to figure out what happened. To make a short, symbol-heavy story even shorter, the two women are able to figure out how and why the wife killed her husband, and the men are puzzled but agree to leave the mystery unsolved, complacent in their knowledge that the women have no idea what's going on.

But the play is actually a little more interesting than just a "haha, those men! Always ignoring women, what fools!" screed against patriarchy. The two women, having figured out the mystery, willfully choose to leave it alone, because they know that the murderess will be executed; however, they feel that the husband, admittedly a rather wretched specimen, deserved what he got. Their evidence for this assertion is a dead canary.

This opens us up to what the play is actually about, in my reading: the tension between masculinity and femininity, expressed here in terms of justice. Whereas a partriarchal society might adhere to the old saw "justice is blind," the women, rebelling, choose to take into account the circumstances and, effectively, decide that the woman already served her term.

Now, I think the play is a little simplistic in the way that it tackles this problem, but I think the larger question of whether or not justice must be blind to be fair is an interesting one, especially in the context of the now-legal profiling of Middle Eastern airline passengers. And that's the thought with which I'll leave this entry.

PS: Please leave your opinions! Comments rock.

PPS: You can buy a sweet copy of Trifles here:
http://www.amazon.com/Trifles-Susan-Glaspell/dp/0981967310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262981596&sr=8-1

Or you can read it online, courtesy the University of Virginia, here:


http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=GlaTrif&tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed


EDIT:

As Donald points out in the comments (everyone should leave comments!), Susan Glaspell also wrote a short story version of Trifles called "A Jury of Her Peers." You can read that here:
http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html

1 comment:

  1. Trifles is an awesome play.

    For those who haven't read it, or have only read the drama, you should check out the short story, also by Glaspell. It fills in some details the play leaves out, due to the nature of the literary form, and both as a whole are a good example of how stories are told differently.

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