The Unhappy Wife

336 Words2 Pages
The Unhappy Wife In her play Trifles, Susan Glaspell writes about a woman trapped in a controlling, loveless marriage. She feels unhappy, trapped and inferior. From this lonely and disconnected farm she kills her husband. The author uses symbols, the bird, the bird cage and the quilt to represent her life. The bird and the birdcage represent Mrs. Wright’s life style and her loneliness. Mrs. Hale says that Mrs. Wright’s house was a lonely place; she says “I dunno what it is but it’s a lonesome place and always was”. Like the bird solitary in its cage, Mrs. Wright lives the same life, an extremely cold, trapped and miserable life. The bird is the symbol of her only happiness. Mr. Wright was bothered by the bird’s singing. Mrs. Wright used to sing and her husband killed the spirit to sing like he killed the bird’s singing. In the play Mrs. Hale says “Wright wouldn’t like the bird-a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too” The quilt represents the way Mrs. Wright killed her husband. Her husband died with a rope around his neck. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peterson were insinuating the patches were going to be knot it not quilted. Mrs. Hale’s says “It’s a log cabin pattern. Pretty isn’t? I wonder if she was knot it” The stitches on the quilt were distortion which shows how anxious and nervous she was. Mrs. Wright wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing and probably had no idea how to kill her husband until she started quilting. She wanted to make him suffered like her bird did. Mrs. Wright was a happy, lively woman before she married john Wright. She had to deal with his abusiveness until she couldn’t any more. The wife was unhappy, caged in with a low self-esteem that used to love to sing. The quilt gave her an idea on how to kill her
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