There is Nothing So Important as Trifles by Anna Behrens

There is Nothing So Important as Trifles by Anna Behrens, MA, CCC-SLP

Recently I had the opportunity to watch an engaging film version of the one-act play Trifles, by Susan Glaspell. The performance was by a local play group called the Edge Ensemble, and happens to star my talented mother-in-law. So, what, if anything, could this play about a woman apparently having murdered her abusive husband have to do with Sherlock Holmes? 

In a serendipitous juxtaposition, I watched in the same evening as Trifles, the Granada Television adaptation of The Abbey Grange (ABBE) because I was creating a presentation on the story for my scion group, The Monadnock Sherlockians. After viewing both films, I had a fitful night of sleep, but I awoke with a feeling of clarity, where I realized that Trifles was in large part a re-telling of the ABBE story! 

For those unfamiliar with Trifles, I recommend the Edge Ensemble’s version on YouTube. It is a fine adaptation that sticks very closely to the original script. The play is out of copyright, and is available to read online as well. It is often studied in feminist studies college courses, and was published 12 years after ABBE. Because Arthur Conan Doyle was the most famous author of his day, and Susan Glaspell a budding journalist and writer, it is a fair assumption that Glaspell was more than somewhat familiar with his Sherlock Holmes stories. 

An obvious clue to the comparison is in the name of the play itself, Trifles, as in Holmes’ mantra “there is nothing so important as trifles.” In fact, Holmes’ success in solving crimes is largely based on his observation of trifles. And trifles ignored by the police are the very thing that lead the protagonist, Mrs. Hale, more in the guise of Miss Marple than Sherlock, to her secret conclusions about the murder of Mr. John Wright.

Mrs. Peters, the Sheriff’s wife who came to the Wright farmhouse to gather clothing for jailed Mrs. Wright, then, is Glaspell’s Watson. Mrs. Peters doesn't see the deeper meaning behind the trifles that Mrs. Hale does until Mrs. Hale enlightens her. Mrs. Peters, like Watson, tends to take things at face value, standing in for the reader or audience member.   

The County Attorney, Sheriff Peters, and Mr. Hale represent Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard or the police force that Holmes typically eclipses. While they go about pursuing the case using traditional methods, they clearly don't have Mrs. Hale's unique skills, so they miss the important clues. They diminish the women's skills as Scotland Yard often downplays Holmes' methods, until they are forced to admit his supremacy. In Trifles, Mrs. Hale does not reveal her superior methods to them, leaving them in the dark, as Holmes has also been known to do. Mr. Hale says dismissively in Trifles, “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles”.

The following similarities are too close to be dismissed as coincidence, and are what led me to the connection between the story and the play. There is an abused wife in both ABBE and Trifles. The husband’s killing of his wife’s beloved bird in Trifles parallels the husband’s killing of his wife’s beloved dog in ABBE.  Margaret Wright is the abused wife in Trifles who does not admit to her crime, and Theresa Wright is the lady’s maid in ABBE who tells of abuse her lady suffered at the hands of her husband and lies to help protect her. 

Mrs. Hale and Holmes use clues (trifles) missed by police as evidence to solve the crime such as the broken bird cage, the dead bird, and the poor stitching in Trifles and the cut bell rope, the bloodstain, and sediment in only one of three wine glasses in ABBE.

Mrs. Hale's sleuthing shows Wright to be the actual perpetrator of crimes against his wife that are unlikely to have been punished, let alone acknowledged, in the patriarchal society they lived in. This is also the case in ABBE, where the abused wife could not seek divorce from her abusive husband, nor have the law against him for his abuse. 

The wives share the initials MF, Minnie Foster in Trifles and Mary Brackenstall (nee Fraser) in ABBE.  And although the characters are not parallel, JW first name and initials are shared by John Watson and the murdered John Wright. 

In both stories, there is justifiable homicide due to abuse suffered by victims, according to Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hale, and supported by Watson and Mrs. Peters. In ABBE, Holmes takes the law into his own hands and appoints Watson the jury, while he himself is the judge, and they let Jack Crocker go free. Holmes justifies it by using the Latin phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God).

By staying silent and hiding the evidence of the dead bird, Mrs. Hale takes the law into her own hands as she deduces that Mrs. Wright is guilty of murdering her husband, but that she is justified because of the psychological abuse she suffered at his hands. As Susan Glaspell’s title of her short story version of her play indicates, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, much like Holmes and Watson, appoint themselves “a jury of her peers.”

Susan Glaspell masterfully used key elements in ABBE to fictionalize the true crime of a murdered husband that she reported on as a journalist. By embodying Holmes and Watson in two housewives, Glaspell penned a feminist masterpiece that is still relevant and taught in feminist studies courses today, more than 100 years after it was first published. Irene Adler would, no doubt, approve.