Ironia e simbologia/feministas em Bagatelas, de Susan Glaspell.

Abstract

This research has the objective of analizing the play Trifles (1916), by Susan Glaspell, from a feminist perspective, and it will highlight aspects of irony and symbology as tools used by the writer to promote a critique of the patriarchal model that predominated in the American society of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. For such an enterprise, we will have the theoretical support of writers, such as, Zolin (2005), Mill (2006), Gilbert e Gubar (1996), Moreira (2003), Sander (2005), among others. The play shows how the female condition could be denounced by literature, which became itself a road taken by women that had desire to be acknowledged in such a male arena. History shows that in these two centuries, specially, patriarchal ideology starts to fall down when women, through social moviments, fight for civil rights for themselves through promoting awareness for their society and for themselves, specially by defending they could occupy the same social spaces as men. In this sense, Trifles discusses gender relations in that society, mainly by showing Mrs. Hale and Peters in a secondary position, from the male perspective, for being women and as such, seen by their husbands as in lack of enough knowledge, all this while they try to find out the motives of a crime. Ironically, the play shows women finding out all the evidences that led Minni to kill her husband, and that happens through non-important domestic objects, proper of the female universe. Glaspell’s work shows that in a society in which predominates the law of men, women are seen as inferior, silenced, submitted and oppressed by the opposite sex. Yet, her text is subversive, since it shows women in subtil, but powerful revolt against patriarchal ideologies that oppress them, specially due to the fact they hide all the evidences to protect their friend, the heroine Minnie.