Pawn In Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Little Details
In Susan Glaspell’s Trifles the characters mention preserves in reference to how women notice the small things. Mrs. Peters knew that Mrs. Wright was always worried about her fruit preserves. In the text Mrs. Wright says, “Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire’d go out and her jars would break” (1040). When they enter the house and go through the cabinets, they notice that the jars are all broken. It seems that Minnie took pride in keeping her preserves safe from shattering and that making fruit preserves was something she liked to do. Mrs. Peters also knows this and get the suspicious feeling about how she could let them break like that. Something must have been going on behind the scenes for her not to light a fire to keep them from breaking. The men see this as no

The women were talking about the unfinished and were wondering if Mrs. Wright was going to quilt it or knot it. The men overhear and interject on their conversation and mock them. When the women look at the quilt they notice that for the most part the stitching is neat and precise, but then they see that at some point it started to become messy and erratic. This was peculiar to the women because it’s such a drastic change. Mrs. Hale says that the sewing was that way because of nervousness, but Mrs. Peters disagrees and narrows it down to just being tired. It can be assumed the messy sewing was the result of something going on with her husband. Perhaps she was angry or maybe she was nervous. It is mentionable that the discussion of knotting the quilt had a correlation with the way the rope was knotted around her husband's neck. Though it is never stated in the play, we can make a educated guess that her husband killed the canary. She decided to kill her husband the way that he killer her bird; she choked him. Putting a rope around his head, tying/knotting it and then strangling