Trifles

Background

The play is loosely based on the murder of John Hossack, which Glaspell reported on while working as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News.[1] On December 2, 1900, Hossack's wife, Margaret, reported to the police that an unknown person broke into their house and murdered John with an axe while she slept next to him. Margaret was arrested for the murder a few days later at John's funeral.[2] Glaspell followed the story closely and reported on its development, filing a total of twenty-six stories on the case over the course of Hossack's arrest and trial.[3] Initially, Glaspell's reporting painted a rich portrait of Hossack as a formidable, cold-blooded woman, thoroughly capable of "having beaten [her husband's] brains out with an axe".[4] However, after Glaspell visited the Hossack family farmhouse to gather materials for her next column, her tone shifted considerably. Subsequent reports from Glaspell showed Hossack under a much more sympathetic light as a meek woman who missed her children.[5]

In her article on the inspiration for Trifles, Linda Ben-Zvi writes, "It is likely that what caused Glaspell to alter her description was her own visit to the Hossack farm, the event she uses as the basis for Trifles".[6] After Hossack's conviction, Glaspell resigned her position as a journalist to write fiction.[7] In April of 1903, Hossack's case was retried. After the jury failed to return a unanimous decision, she was released and able to return home.[8] The lawmen in Trifles are inspired by the original investigators: the County Attorney and the Sheriff. Mr. Hale's character is Glaspell's creation. His name is possibly derived from one of the Indianola farmers who testified at the Hossack trial.[9]

A year after Trifles' success, Glaspell turned the play into a short story, retitling it "A Jury of Her Peers".[10] Glaspell used third-person, limited-omniscient narration to express the point of view of Martha Hale.[10] "A Jury of Her Peers" adds irony by "highlighting the impossibility of women facing such a jury at a time when women were systematically denied the right to be jurors".[11]

Furthermore, Glaspell "capitalized on the growing interest in this form of narrative, a genre that was first popularized in the United States by Edgar Allan Poe".[12] Her dedication to the mystery genre "advances her feminist agenda: all members of the audience, regardless of sex, come to understand each piece of the puzzle through the perspectives of the women sleuths as they grapple the evidence".[12]


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