CARVALHO, Dayse de Fátima Fernandes Crispim.
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.
