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Although Minnie never appears on stage, she of central importance to the play. In a way, the entire play is an investigation of Minnie’s motives, and the various characters’ perceptions of Minnie gradually shape her character for the audience. Early on, it becomes clear that the male and female characters perceive Minnie very differently. The men find her behavior “queer” and judge her to be a poor housekeeper based on the mess they find in her kitchen. They also mock her for worrying about her canned fruit freezing in the cold, a mere “trifle” compared to her plight of being held for murder. The men all seem reasonably certain that Minnie was responsible for the murder, but none of them seem to have the faintest clue as to why she might have done killed her husband.

In contrast, the women readily empathize with Minnie and resent the men for unfairly slandering her character. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can easily perceive that Minnie suffered an oppressive marriage to a cold, cruel man. They compare her suffering to their own oppression—and that of all married women—in a male-dominated society. From Mrs. Hale, we learn that before Minnie Foster married John Wright, she was a vibrant, outgoing young woman who sang beautifully in the local choir. After marrying him, she became sad, lonely, and reclusive. She never had children and endured a long, loveless marriage in a home consistently described as cold and unwelcoming. Based on the clues uncovered by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, Minnie likely strangled John Wright because he strangled her pet canary, a parallel for how he (figuratively) suffocated Minne and stifled her happiness for the duration of their marriage.  

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