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Binary Opposition In Glaspell's Trifles

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Picture this, there is a young girl standing in a room waiting for something. What is she waiting for. Often times people conclude that she is waiting for a man. Why? Because women being “helpless” and needing a man to take care of her is a stereotype. Throughout history, many gender roles have been placed upon women. Women are told to be wives and mothers and to take care of the home. Women are shown to be nurturing and are told to be “good” girls or else they would be punished. All of these, plus others like, being inferior, passive, less intelligent, emotional, weak, and maintaining a lower social position are all stereotypes. By definition a stereotype ”is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of …show more content…

Binary opposition is a key concept in structuralism, a theory of sociology, anthropology, and linguistics that states that all elements of human culture can only be understood in relation to one another and how they function within a larger system or the overall environment”, or more simply put a pair of items with opposite meanings. Many examples can be pulled from Trifles including: that women are weak when in the play Mrs. Wright had the strength to hang her husband while he was asleep, additionally Hale states “ Well, women are used to worrying over trifles”, when by the end of the play the women are the ones to completely solve the case. Another example of binary opposition in Trifles is that men are portrayed as active characters in society, when throughout the story the men are very passive and they do not do as much as the women do.More binary oppositions include that women are crazy and that men are sane. The final main binary opposition is that women are irrational and emotional, while men are calm and rational, this is proved incorrect when the men storm from room to room and all throughout the property looking for evidence, while the women stay calm and collected and find the evidence within the

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