Play

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles is filled with moral questions and ethical ambiguity. Throughout the one-act play, each character makes moral and ethical choices that affect the outcome of the investigation. Their moral choices also reveal key things about their characters, their worldview, and their ethical codes. At the center of the play is Minnie Wright and her dead husband John. Death is often a moral matter. If John had committed suicide, the act would have raised questions about the ethics of suicide. If indeed Minnie has killed John, several other ethical questions come to the fore. Glaspell opts to leave the ethics of the play purposefully ambiguous. Whereas the men on the side of the law like the Sheriff and Attorney have simplistic ethical systems in which there are clear-cut delineations between right and wrong, the women in Trifles explore far more complex dimensions of moral choices.

Trifles therefore...
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