“to make her feel more natural” in prison

As with Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper,” a certain didactic intention gives much of Glaspell’s Trifles a forced, over-insistent quality. In her eagerness that we clearly perceive Mrs. Wright’s oppression, but also owing to the compressed scale of the one-act form, the contrasts between bluff, patronizing menfolk and timorous, knowing ladies can at times appear starkly overdrawn. Yet if some of Glaspell’s symbolism points too obviously—e.g., the fruit preserves burst from the pressure of domestic hell, whose gooey contents repulse the anal attorney—other touches work more subtly. Just after Mrs. Hale, the farmer’s wife, has evoked the young Minnie Foster, a ghost of possibility that vanished into “Mrs. Wright,” the sheriff’s wife notes that the woman asked from her jail cell for her apron. “I suppose just to make her feel more natural,” Mrs. Peters offers as explanation, suggesting a seamless identification between woman and garment, emblem and instrument of her gender-assigned lot: domestic toil. At the same time, the plaintive psychological note—the scared suspect clutching at some homely token—carries a thematic chill. Having exchanged one cell for another, the prisoner, resigned, seeks to adapt and comply, to “feel more natural,” by wearing her familiar prisoner’s uniform.