Moral Rightness over Legal Rightness: Womens Justice in Glaspells Trifles - Research Paper Example

14 May Moral Rightness over Legal Rightness: Women’s Justice in Glaspell’s Trifles The law is not right, if the conscience says it is wrong. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles problematizes the conflict between what is morally right and what is legally right. The County Attorney, Mr. Hale, and Mr. Peters search the Wright’s house for potential motive on John’s death. Unknown to their husbands, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover the motive for Minnie’s crime. The decision of silence shows their struggle against the traditional notion of justice. They realize that legal rightness does not give justice to Minnie’s dehumanized conditions. The play uses setting, choices of staging, characters, symbolism, and irony to argue that when a complex perpetrator is a victim too, moral rightness is more important than legal rightness. The play evokes emotions that create the problem of justice because of the emotional trauma that Minnie experienced as an oppressed member of her society and marriage. The setting contributes to the feelings of injustice because of the objects of domestic life that monopolized Minnie’s life. The County Attorney and the men treat women’s specific home spaces as unimportant. When he asks the Sheriff if he thinks that the kitchen does not have any clues, the latter says: “Nothing here but kitchen things” (Glaspell 9). The combination of the words “nothing” and “kitchen” implicates men’s treatment of women, where their work is irrelevant, and so women, by connection, are irrelevant members of society too. Furthermore, as a one-act play that is set entirely in the house and generally in the kitchen, it shows that the environment strongly shapes the attitudes and behaviors of characters. Men focus their investigation on dominant male spaces in the house. As they went upstairs to the bedroom and leave the women behind, they also put women in their proper space, their proper place (Glaspell 11). The resulting action is the spatial gap between men and women, where upstairs refers to men’s sense of inferiority, while women downstairs indicate their subjugated status. Moreover, the women find evidence of Minnie’s conditions as a wife. Everything she owns is mostly in the kitchen, and here Mrs. Peters discovers the bird cage with a broken hinge (Glaspell 15). Minnie has the bird as her only private possession, but even that is taken away from her. At the same time, Mrs. Hale has a short monologue as she remarks on Minnie’s household work: “She'll feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer” (Glaspell 11). The setting shows her unfinished business, such as the bread and fruit preserves, business that illustrates what Minnie is to her husband, a house slave. The setting provokes emotions of injustice, which men do not know and understand because they are the oppressors of the social system. Aside from the setting, the choices of staging contribute to the sense of injustice through demonstrating the contrast between male and female ways of investigation. Suzy Clarkson Holstein differentiates men’s linear investigation from women’s intuitive investigation. On the one hand, men determine clues in an organized manner, so the staging includes their interviews and movements. The County Attorney interviews Mr. Hale to determine the events before he discovered John’s body, starting with his visit to the Wright’s home (Glaspell 9). Holstein says: “The county attorney conducts his investigation by the book. He interviews the key witness, asking for only facts (interpretations, he indicates, will receive attention later)” (283). This method focuses on tangible evidence and their implications for the crime. On the other hand, Holstein describes women’s investigation method that relies on intuition, where they do not even have to move to determine what they know about Minnie and John. The staging is actually more inward when it comes to women’s views on Minnie. Mrs. Hale emphasizes how Minnie’s life changed because of her marriage. She tells the County Attorney: “But I don't think a place'd be any cheerfuller for John Wright's being in it” (Glaspell 10). She gives her intuitive response to John’s cold attitude toward women in general and Minnie in particular. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale aim “to reconstruct the accused woman's life” through “memories of her, memories of their own lives (similar to hers in many ways), and speculation about her feelings and responses to the conditions of her life” (Holstein 283). They study Minnie’s identity through understanding her context from various sources of knowledge, and so the staging highlights their inferences more than their actions. These different staging approaches coincide with the differences in how men and women determine information about the accused and the victim. While Glaspell uses setting, she further employs characters who change or do not in the course of the play, wherein changes or lack of it affect their sense of justice and rightness. Men are flat characters in the story because they never change their views on women and do not learn the motive for killing John. Holstein underscores that because these men undermine women and their trifles, they never understand why Minnie could have killed her husband (284). Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, however, develop a sense of oneness with Minnie. Mrs. Hale is more outright and sure than Mrs. Peters in defending Minnie to the County Attorney. She says to him: “Farmers’ wives have their hands full” (Glaspell 10). She feels being judged, as these men judge Minnie’s character by her dirty towels. Mrs. Hale further becomes a rounder character as she gains deeper insight of who Minnie is and why she must not be imprisoned for her crime. After discovering the dead bird, she influences Mrs. Peters to no longer tell what they discovered to the men: “I know how things can be -- for women. I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things -- it's all just a different kind of the same thing” (Glaspell 20-21). She reminds Mrs. Peters that women are the same inside, even when they live in different homes because they experience the same injustices that are brought about by their sex. Mrs. Peters is a round character too and she changes the most among all characters. She tells a story about a boy killing her kitten and she notes that she must have “hurt him” if she had the chance (Glaspell 19). She finally learns what injustice means because like Minnie, she has personally felt what it is to be excluded in society. Perceptions of exclusion affect their sense of moral justice. Their investigation hints that Minnie experienced the worst kind of emotional anguish through her husband’s authoritarian practices. James Olson et al. study the meaning of moral exclusion. One of their definitions of exclusion is: “…exclusion has sometimes been conceptualized as the belief that a moral rule or abstract principle does not apply to a target person or group” (Olson et al. 366). In the case of Minnie, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters understand her exclusion in the decision-making process of society and their families. Mr. Hale notes that “women are used to worrying over trifles” (Glaspell 9). Since women are undervalued in their societies, they are excluded in their public social systems. As a result, they find it easy to exclude men in their own moral justice system too. The ironies and symbolisms indicate that what is morally right can be more right than what is legally right, when people realize the complex reversals of antagonist and protagonist roles. The initial antagonist is Minnie because she is the primary suspect of mariticide, or the killing of one’s spouse. Mrs. Peters reveals what she knows about the investigation to Mrs. Hale: “Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech and he'll make fun of her sayin' she didn't wake up” (Glaspell 12-13). Minnie is sure to be pinned down and to be charged guilty, as long as evidence is clear on her motive. Conversations enabled female characters to discuss the moral implications of their decision. Brian C. Gunia et al. explore the role of contemplation and conversation in making moral decisions. They state: “contemplation allows decision makers to access, consider, and integrate moral values, increasing the likelihood of ethical decisions” (Gunia et al. 15). The situational irony of the play is that through these “trifles” of conversations and interests, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters learn what the men do not. Minnie is not a perpetrator because she is a victim, the real protagonist in her marriage and life. Mrs. Peters initially affirms the permanence of legal justice when she tells Mrs. Hale that “…the law is the law” (Glaspell 13). She changes her mind because they gather evidence and their implications for Minnie’s crime. Mrs. Hale tries to persuade Mrs. Peters that they must not say anything about the dead bird. She stresses what happened to John: “His neck. Choked the life out of him” (Glaspell 19). In reality, the bird is the one who is killed, and for Mrs. Hale, the bird is Minnie too. She says: “She -- come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself -- real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and -- fluttery. How -- she -- did – change” (Glaspell 17). The symbolism is clear because before Minnie married John, she is as free and as happy as a bird. After their marriage, she is imprisoned in their home, her own bird cage. John is the ultimate antagonist. As he brutally killed the bird, it stands for his symbolic brutal smothering of Minnie’s humanity. The sewing and its techniques are critical symbols to the play because they show how women understand the difference between moral rightness and legal rightness. The mise-en-scene of Mrs. Hale depicts her direct participation in serving justice. Glaspell describes her words: “All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It's all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!” (Glaspell 14). Her actions include the materials of the chair and the quilt: “After she has said this they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door. After an instant Mrs. Hale has pulled at a knot and ripped the sewing” (Glaspell 14). Mrs. Hale knows that sewing is a woman’s job, but more than that, to finish what another woman has done is a moral job. Group identification prioritizes moral justice over legal justice. Jing Du, Jin Nam Choi, and Fadi Hashem note from their study that people have a strong sense of unity with members of their group: “…individuals with high group identification feel a sense of oneness with a group and are motivated to promote the interest of the group because they accept group membership as part of their self-definition” (Du et al. 292). Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters know that what they are doing is right because only they can protect the interests of their sex. Justice that men can offer women is masculine justice. They cannot possibly understand why Minnie killed her husband and why she must not be punished for it. The ending of the play is a strong conclusion for the meaning of moral justice. Mrs. Hale says that Mrs. Wright is going to knot her quilting (Glaspell 21). Symbolically, as women, they knot their tongues too. They knot their tongues because men’s legal justice is right only in their own terms. The law can be wrong, especially law that men made to serve their own interests. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters choose a moral decision over a legally right one. They relate to Minnie’s victimized status and believe that their conscience have done the truly right thing. The modern audience will feel the conflict of what Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters did. These characters are wrong because Minnie should be punished for her crime. It does not matter whether John deserved it or not. They might forget that during Minnie’s time, to be a woman is a crime against women. To be a woman is to be in a cage, especially a married woman. To be a woman means the loss of freedom to be who they want to be because society demands that they pursue only their domestic roles and responsibilities. If they were Minnie, perhaps their decision would be different. Perhaps, they would feel the wrongness of it all, when to be a woman is to be as lifeless as a bird with a wrung neck. Works Cited Du, Jing, Choi, Jin Nam, and Fadi Hashem. “Interaction between One's Own and Others' Procedural Justice Perceptions and Citizenship Behaviors in Organizational Teams: The Moderating Role of Group Identification.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 16.4 (2012): 289-302. PsycARTICLES. Web. 8 May 2013. Glaspell, Susan. Trifles: A Play in One Act. Boston: Baker's Plays, 1951. 5-21. Print. Gunia, Brian C., Wang, Long, Huang, Li, Wang, Jiunwen, and Keith Murnighan. “Contemplation and Conversation: Subtle Influences on Moral Decision Making.” Academy of Management Journal 55.1 (2012): 13-33. Business Source Complete. Web. 8 May 2013. Holstein, Suzy Clarkson. “Silent Justice in a Different Key: Glaspell's 'Trifles'.” The Midwest Quarterly 44.3 (2003): 282-290. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 8 May 2013. Olson, James, Cheung, Irene, Conway, Paul, Hutchison, Jessica, and Carolyn Hafer. “Distinguishing Two Meanings of Moral Exclusion: Exclusion from Moral Principles or Principled Harm-Doing?” Social Justice Research 24.4 (2011): 365-390. SocINDEX. Web. 8 May 2013. Read More