Trifles by Susan Glaspell

I personally liked Trifles more than Overtones, but that is because I'm a sucker for complexity and micro symbolism. I really liked the big picture image of the women solving the murder that the men were trying to figure out. You start to wonder why the saying, "Look at the big picture" is much more popular than, "It’s all about the little things." In fact, if you were to say the latter phrase, someone might call you narrow-minded. In Trifles, that's exactly what the men think of the women, narrow-minded, lesser-minded, less educated, and unsuited for "a man's job." If the women were in any way unsuited for solving crime, it was because they withheld evidence and protected a criminal. I don’t blame the women for feeling guilty. I don’t blame them for sympathizing with Mrs. Wright either, and I certainly don’t blame them for feeling offended by the men’s criticizing and misunderstanding of Mrs. Wright. It doesn’t justify what they did for her, but it allows the reader to understand why they did it. I think that Mrs. Hale and Peters know that what they did isn’t justified, but because of their guilt, feel they are justified to make up for their lack of care in the past. In the end, the women solved the case the men believed they didn’t have the ability to, they outsmarted the men and hid from them the truth of the crime, and allowed the men to assume they had the power they believed themselves to have. Towards the end of the play, they even jabbed at the fact that Mrs. Peters was “married to the law” by being the sheriff’s wife. However, the women jabbed back with the use of wit when they said, “knot it.”