Female Intuition: Fact or Myth?

Being a feminist, Trifles will always be one of my favorite plays. When we read it last semester in Dr. Nixon's class, we talked about a subject that seemed to baffle him completely: A woman's intuition. So, as I re-read the play, I thought more about the concept and about a few of my favorite scenes.

Without a doubt, the women play the most important role in this play. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are ultimately the ones who find the evidence and draw their own conclusions about the murder. But at the beginning, when the five adults walk into the unkempt Wright residence and step into the kitchen, the County Attorney comments that Mrs. Wright, was “not much of a housekeeper”. During such times when women played a very specific domestic role in every household, the kitchen was often seen as a woman’s sanctuary—a foreign land for most of the male population. Glaspell demonstrates this idea well by maneuvering the entire play from the kitchen, the woman’s space; essentially all of the action happens in the kitchen.

Another aspect I found interesting was the interrogation scene between the County Attorney and Mrs. Hale. Glaspell definitely changed the tone between this interrogation scene and the previous one between the County Attorney and Mr. Hale. As the County Attorney is speaking to Mr. Hale, the Attorney politely asks Mr. Hale for a recollection when “you came here yesterday morning”. He proceeds to ask Mr. Hale other questions during the scene, but let’s Hale answer at his own pace without interruption. However, when the County Attorney turns to Mrs. Hale for answers, his tone is harsher, more fast-paced, and even interrupting of her responses. After the Attorney is through with the questioning, the men head upstairs into the bedroom to investigate the crime scene.

In the time period that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are downstairs, they proceed to find the most significant evidence: fruit jars, a dish cloth, the setting loaf of bread, the broken bird cage, the half cleaned table, the unfinished quilt, and most importantly, the dead canary bird wrapped in a delicate piece of silk in the sewing box. Glaspell gave her female characters the gift of common sense, and the women were able to seemingly put the pieces of the murder together. Both women concluded that Mrs. Wright had strangled her husband because he had—in turn—strangled her beautiful singing canary. Mrs. Hale makes sense of the bird’s murder: “Wright wouldn’t like the bird—a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too”. By the end of the play, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters do protect their own sex by hiding the evidence; Glaspell preserves the sacredness of female intuition and creates heroines from trifles.