Women in a patriarchal society and trifles - Essay Example

The play Trifles revolves around the investigation conducted by a sheriff and a county attorney in the house of a woman who was accused of murdering her husband who was found in his bed with a rope around in his neck. Accompanying them is the couple’s neighbor who was the first man to discover the body. In the background, are wives of the sheriff and the neighbor who tagged along with their husbands while the men went around the house searching for evidence that would clearly show the motive of the wife in the killing of her husband.

Glaspell’s play highlights the structural distinction between men and women in a patriarchal society in which women are regarded as inferior to men. Men, for example, hold significant jobs while women were kept in homes, cleaning, cooking, quilting and having babies. This inequality between the sexes places wives at a disadvantage because while men hold jobs keeping them out of the house most of the time and exposing them to a social life, women were tied down to their chores in homes with no one to share their thoughts with and no one to keep them company except husbands who come home at night and who did not treat them on equal footing.

Minnie Wright exemplifies this type of a woman whose world had been confined to the four corners of her home, lonely and desperate and living with a husband who obviously kept to himself and who wanted to shut the noise out of their home. When he wrung the neck of her bird, her last source of joy, perhaps to keep it quiet forever, Mrs. Wright finally snapped and tied a rope around his neck while he was asleep. All throughout the play, the same pattern of inequality between men and women are reflected by the other characters of the play with women playing secondary role to male characters.

II In Trifles, Glaspell shows that men regarded women as beneath them and