While the sheriff and the county attorney search the Wright property for evidence, Mrs. Hale and the sheriff's wife discover clues to the murder among trivial items they find in the kitchen. Mrs. Peters: Wife of the sheriff.
Peters find the dead canary in a box. Mrs. Hale was convinced that Mr. Wright killed the bird, she stated, “No, Wright wouldn't like the bird—a thing that sang.
The play is loosely based on the murder of John Hossack, which Glaspell reported on while working as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News. On December 2, 1900, Hossack's wife, Margaret, reported to the police that an unknown person broke into their house and murdered John with an axe while she slept next to him.
John Wright has been strangled to death with a rope in his mega-creepy Midwestern farmhouse.
The canary represents Minnie Foster: that sweet, fluttery girl who was transformed into the lonely, depressed Mrs. Wright by years of her husband's neglect and emotional abuse.
Susan Glaspell's one-act play, Trifles, is based on actual events that occurred in Iowa at the turn of the century. From 1899-1901 Glaspell worked as a reporter for the Des Moines News, where she covered the murder trial of a farmer's wife, Margaret Hossack, in Indianola, Iowa.
Hale and Mrs. Peters, who accompany their husbands to the murder scene are able to perceive the importance of items that the men, who are there in an official capacity, brush off as mere trifles. For this reason, the women solve the murder mystery.
The bird also symbolizes Minnie's need for companionship in her childless home, and the death of the bird showed that John not only didn't acknowledge this need but actually removed her remaining source of happiness in a cruel and brutal way.
Perhaps the single most important theme in Trifles is the difference between men and women. The two sexes are distinguished by the roles they play in society, their physicality, their methods of communication and—vital to the plot of the play— their powers of observation.
The title of the play is oozing with irony. The title comes from this gem of a line from Hale: "Well, women are used to worrying about trifles" (132). He says this in response to the fact that Mrs. Wright seems to be more worried about her preserves bursting than she is about the fact that she's being held for murder.