This week on StoryWeb, Susan Glaspell's play Trifles.

Born in 1876, Susan Glaspell was a prominent novelist, short story writer, journalist, biographer, actress, and, most notably, playwright, winning the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison's House. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the ground-breaking Provincetown Players, widely known as the first modern American theater company. In fact, it was Glaspell who discovered dramatist Eugene O'Neill as she was searching for a new playwright to feature at the theater.

Though she was a widely acclaimed author during her lifetime, with pieces in Harper's and Ladies' Home Journal and with books on the New York Times bestsellers list, Glaspell is little known today. She comes down to us for two related works: her one-act play Trifles, written in 1916, and a short story based on the play, "A Jury of Her Peers," written in 1917. The play and the story were based on Margaret Hossack's murder trial, which Glaspell covered as a young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News in her home state of Iowa.

Trifles ­­– which she wrote in just ten days – is a masterful account of the way two housewives successfully unravel the mystery of another housewife's murder of her husband. Mr. Wright has been found dead in his bedroom, strangled with a rope. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is in the kitchen, acting "queer," according to Mr. Hale, the neighbor who initially discovers the murder.

The play takes place the day after the murdered man is discovered and after his wife has been taken to jail. Three prominent men of the community – Sheriff Peters, County Attorney Henderson, and Mr. Hale – go to investigate the murder scene. Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale bring their wives along with them, just in case they can discover any clues to the murder.

It is widely assumed that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, but what is her motive? The three men are truly stumped. What would cause an ordinary housewife in a seemingly calm and tidy home to kill her husband?

As the detectives are investigating the murder scene in the bedroom upstairs, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale look around the kitchen and the parlor. Little by little, they begin to spy clues to Mrs. Wright's emotional state. Erratic stitches in a piece of quilting when all the other needlework was straight, beautiful, unblemished. An empty birdcage with a broken door. A dead canary – its neck twisted – hidden in Mrs. Wright's sewing basket in a piece of silk. The women realize without even speaking to each other that Mr. Wright had killed the bird and driven his wife to murder. And with silent, knowing looks at each other, they decide not to tell the men what they've discovered.

For an outstanding reworking of Glaspell's play, see Kaye Gibbons's 1991 novel, A Cure for Dreams. Gibbons, a North Carolina writer, obviously had Trifles in mind as she depicts ##, a character who "hides" her crime in her quilting. You can learn more about the connections between Trifles and A Cure for Dreams in my first book, A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South. (Check out Chapter 6, "The Southern Wild Zone: Voices on the Margins." My discussion of A Cure for Dreams begins on page 194, and I explore the links between Glaspell and Gibbons on pages 201-202.)

Trifles also make me think of Adrienne Rich's early poem "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers." The elderly Aunt Jennifer has spent her adult life being "mastered" by her husband. His ring – that is, her wedding band – weighs heavy on her hand. But that weight doesn't stop her from creating scenes of liberation, power, and strength in her needlepoint. In her tapestry, Aunt Jennifer depicts tigers – "prancing, proud and unafraid." There's a story there, Rich seems to say, a sign for those who are adept enough to read it.

Finally, Trifles reminds me of African American women quilters who sewed into their quilts messages about the underground railroad. The classic study of these quilts is Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Something seemingly so simply and utilitarian as a quilt has the power to be subversive. As Alice Walker notes in her landmark essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," women's creativity – and the clues it provides to women's lives – can be found everywhere if one simply knows where to look. Quilts, gardens, kitchens – "just" women's work – can illuminate the secrets of women's lives.

One thing's for sure: Glaspell's work deserves more attention. Oxford University Press published Linda Ben-Zvi's biography of Glaspell in 2005, and both Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers" are widely anthologized and frequently taught in classrooms across the country. If you want to join me in learning more about Glaspell, visit the website of the International Susan Glaspell Society. They even offer a timeline of Glaspell's writing of Trifles. And to learn about Glaspell's most enduring legacy, the Provincetown Players, visit the Provincetown Playhouse website, dedicated to preserving the history of this truly revolutionary theater.

Listen now as I read Susan Glaspell's short story "A Jury of Her Peers" in its entirety.

 

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

"Martha!" now came her husband's impatient voice. "Don't keep folks waiting out here in the cold."

She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn't seem like a sheriff's wife. She was small and thin and didn't have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff's wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn't look like a sheriff's wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff—a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale's mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights' now as a sheriff.

"The country's not very pleasant this time of year," Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.

Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

"I'm glad you came with me," Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.

Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn't cross it now was simply because she hadn't crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, "I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster"—she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.

 The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, "Come up to the fire, ladies."

Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. "I'm not—cold," she said.

And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.

The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. "Now, Mr. Hale," he said in a sort of semi-official voice, "before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning."

The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

"By the way," he said, "has anything been moved?" He turned to the sheriff. "Are things just as you left them yesterday?"

Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker