Stereotypes are preconceived notions of other people based on the color of their skin, their gender, their age, or any number of other factors. They are based on general characteristics of a particular group of people such as ‘all Jews are stingy’ or ‘all women belong in the home.’ In short stories, authors frequently exploit these stereotypical concepts to illustrate a point. This can be seen in Susan Glaspell’s short story “Trifles” as the women are overlooked despite the fact that they have solved the mystery of Mr. Wright’s murder.
As Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale set to work gathering a few things for Mrs. Wright’s comfort in prison as she awaits investigation and trial following her husband’s death, in bed by strangulation with a noose around his neck, they begin to piece together the puzzle of this mysterious murder. The men laugh about the ‘trifles’ that the women are concerned with – Mrs. Wright at the prison worried about her preserves breaking in the cold and the two women in the kitchen noticing the quilt work Mrs. Wright had been working on – however, it is these trifles that tell the story of what happened. Because they are women, the men automatically assume that they are incapable of understanding the gravity of what has occurred just as the men have apparently ignored the possibility that it was Mrs. Wright who killed her husband.
While the men search for a motive, the women find Mrs. Wright’s quilting blocks and discover all the evidence the men need, not that they’re willing to point it out: “Here, this is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It’s all over the place! Why it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about!” Tucked deep inside the basket is a fancy box intended for scissors, but instead holds the body of a small canary with its head twisted around backward. As the women discuss the clues, they realize “Wright wouldn’t like the bird – a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.” Although the women realize that a crime must be punished and that Mrs. Wright must have been driven mad by the harsh treatment of her husband, between them there is an almost unspoken agreement that Wright’s harsh treatment of his wife, keeping her in isolation and silence, was also a crime that deserved punishment and keeps the knowledge of what they know to themselves.
While stereotypes suggest that the women are unintelligent, incapable of being interested in weightier matters than the ‘trifles’ they are overheard discussing by the men, Glaspell illustrates how it is in these very details that the women, not the men, are able to solve the crime. Had the men not been so willing to believe in the submissiveness and general quiet nature of women that is suggested in these stereotypes, they might have realized some of the facts that the women were able to discern. The women, aware of how Mrs. Wright’s actions would upset these stereotypes and thus cause the community to think of her as ‘unnatural’, decide to keep their knowledge to themselves because they are able to understand how Mrs. Wright felt.