Trifles...What we don't see.

Trifles is a play that we can expect the unexpected.  One point I would like to bring up revolves around the term forsaken. The text tells us, “I wish I’d come over here once in a while! That was a crime!”  (pg.5). Socially these women had to come to a decision to hide and ultimately protect their fellow woman.  The guilt of Mrs. Hale and the way that the women explain that Mr. Wright was a hard man made for the character Minnie to feel forsaken in that she had nowhere to turn her problems to.   The murder is even forsaken when Hale and the Attorney confirm, “Well, women are used to worrying about trifles” (pg. 2). Though who is worrying about her?  The men are not concerned with who the really villain may be. Villainy  has made the play a clear representation of the unseen.

In the opening stage directions it reads, “The kitchen in a now abandoned farmhouse” (pg.1). The world is tight, private, and begins with nothing but what everyone comes in with. The sense of something has gone wrong sets the mood of mystery and intrigue that is not happy.  When we finally are told the exposition where John Wright is, Minnie was narrated to say, “He’s Dead” “She just pointed upstairs” (pg.1). What could be upstairs? The world we found out throughout the play is not vacant of information, trifles, but physical space.