Legal and Domestic Geographies in Susan Glaspell's Trifles

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B ased loosely on the events surrounding the investigation into the murder of Iowa farmer John Hossack in 1900, Susan Glaspell's 1916 one-act play Trifles has been described as a meditation on the non-correspondence between justice and the law (Bendel-Simso 292).The action takes place shortly after the murder by strangulation of the fictionalized Hossack, John Wright.His wife, Minnie Foster Wright, has been arrested for the crime and is being detained in the local jail.A county attorney and the sheriff, along with the neighbor who first encountered Minnie Wright on the morning after the murder, enter the home to investigate.Accompanying them are Mrs.Hale and Mrs. Peters, the wives of the neighbor and the sheriff, respectively.As the women collect Minnie's belongings to take to her in jail, they stumble upon various pieces of evidence that point to her long-term domestic abuse.The critical consensus about Trifles vis--vis this evidence is threefold: Minnie Wright's abuse is motive for murder; Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters believe, based on this evidence, that Minnie Wright did indeed kill her husband; and they knowingly tamper with, destroy, and cover up this evidence, thus serving as a jury of the woman's peers.Preeminent Glaspell scholar Linda Ben-Zvi is often cited for her contention that, "[b]y not bringing Minnie physically on to the stage, [Trifles] focuses on issues that move beyond the guilt or innocence of one person" ("'Murder, She Wrote'" 154).Insofar as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters enact a form of feminist justice beyond the law-a poetic justice, even-the play is almost universally considered a critique of the masculine sphere of the law.That justice obtains, however, only if Minnie Wright has indeed murdered her husband.Even Ben-Zvi contends that Mrs. Peters "dispens[es] her verdict based on her reading of the case and the motives for murder" (156).As Mary Bendel-Simso acknowledges, there is no real physical evidence that John Wright has, in the legal sense, committed