Peters and Mrs. Hale find the birdcage hidden in the kitchen cabinets, it is a form of symbolism to the confinement Minne was experiencing in her own home. Mrs. Hale also makes a point to the men that she doesn’t communicate with her neighbor as much as she would have liked because the house “never seemed a cheerful place.” The lack of communication to those outside of her house may have lead Minnie to her decision to murder her husband. The broken hinge on the birdcage and the dead bird leads the reader to believe that Mr. Wright was an abusive husband. The bird symbolizes the true essence of Minne’s spirit and happiness. Just like Mr. Wright killed the bird, he also “killed” his wife’s singing spirit.
Both plays feature women dominated by the men in their lives. Ophelia * Ophelia, once a lovely, vibrant girl, receives cruel and unjust treatment from Hamlet (her fiancé). His treatment of her eventually causes her insanity and subsequent suicide. Mrs. Wright * Wright from Trifles was once a pretty, cheerful young woman who enjoyed singing in the church choir and engaging in other social events. When she marries John Wright, he isolates her on their farm, refusing even to obtain a telephone and kills the one possession that is precious to her - her little singing bird.
The Justice of Women “A Jury of Her Peers”, by Susan Glaspell, shows two women solving a murder because of their ability to pay attention to little details. Their husbands, who are important men in a small town, by ignoring women’s “trifles” – pans, dirty towels, sewing baskets – are not able to solve the case and even so the men mock the details observed by the women. While women talk about small details like dirty towels and sewing baskets, the men laugh at them and do not see the evidences. The female characters find the strangled bird, killed in the same way as the deceased (John Wright). The strangled bird symbolizes the miserable life of Mrs. Wright because she did not have kids, she possibly treated the bird as her child to sign
Which ultimately lead the women to hide critical evidence from the men because they wouldn’t understand anyways. The setting, characters, and clues all contribute to the theme of gender roles of men and women in this short story. A big contributor of the theme of “A Jury of her Peers” is the setting in which the story takes place. Being that the story takes place in the early nineteen hundreds, the women are not seen as helpful. The women are kept in their domain, the kitchen, throughout the entire story because that is where men believed the women should be.
Putting aside the differences they have a trait in common; they are true life stories that happen to women on a daily basis. The poem “Barbie Doll” is very different from the poem “La Migra.” It is a very discouraging poem because the destructiveness of the standards of female beauty led to the girl’s death. The young girl classmates used to make fun of her big nose and fat legs. “Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.”(line 6). She got to the point that she was not strong enough to take all the pressure, so she cut herself up and offered her legs and nose up.
Marilyn Underwood notices that Mrs.Barrows is like the bird sparrow, both in the name and behavior (Underwood 49). A sparrow settles in the nest of another bird and pecks away its foundations, thereby depriving the owner of shelter (Underwood 49). It is very quick and effective in doing so. Similarly, Mrs. Barrows settles in F & S and is trying to “peck away its foundations” by ousting its employers. Without her, the atmosphere at F & S is dull and “routinized to the point of absurdity” (Kaufman 9).
However, the women, more penetrating in their vision, they piece together the sort of married life Mrs. Wright had lived. Following up on a series of clues, the women manage to reconstruct Minnie Wright’s motive. In silent collusion, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters choose not to disclose the clues that reveal the motive, thereby constituting themselves as a jury and tacitly acquitting Minnie of any wrongdoing. “No Name Woman” is an autobiography written by Maxine Hong Kingston relates how on the night when her aunt gave birth to an illegitimate child. The people of the Chinese village in which the aunt and her family lived ransacked the family's house, killed all of their
“Trifles,” written by Susan Glaspell, is a murder mystery that explores gender relationships, differences between the sexes, and the nature of truth. In the play, the farmer and his wife never actually appear; instead, the story focuses on the prosecutor, George Henderson, who has been called in to investigate the murder; Henry Peters, the local sheriff; Lewis Hale, a neighboring farmer who discovered Mrs. Wright’s body; and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, wives of the two local men. The story “Trifles,” is a murder mystery that explores gender relationships in some very subtle ways. The drama takes place at the house where Mr. Wright’s body was discovered to be dead. Immediately the men are paired up on one side as the women are paired up on the other.
Tommy Ford November 4, 2013 Period 1 We Are Not Who we Seem In society women are usually seen as fragile and delightful , but that is not always the case. The short stories “The Landlady” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”, written by Roald Dahl , in the Landlady, we read about a woman who murders young men and stuffs them to preserve their bodies and keep them as her permanent guest. In the story “Lamb to the Slaughter” we learn that Mary Maloney kills her husband because he promised to leave her.They show us the importance of appearance versus reality, as they show how things can often be different to how they seem,and that we can be easily deceived if we are too reliant on looks. In both of the short stories we see how the two women / antagonist Mary Maloney and The Landlady share similar traits,yet are different because they have different motivations for what they did. One major similarity between these two characters was their ability to gain a sense of trust with the male characters and the audience through positive impressions.Mary Maloney is portrayed as the compliant and perfect housewife.
She could have boringly stated that it didn’t make sense for them to call the birds “pink” flamingos instead of just flamingos. It also gives her emotion in this sentence as well. It makes her sound upset, as if people don’t know the actual meaning of the flamingo. During the first paragraph she gives a good example of selfishness. She states “It’s ironic, since Americans had hunted flamingoes to extinction…” She is telling us how selfish the Americans were, hunting the birds to extinction and then using them for tourism.