Trifles: Motifs | SparkNotes

Laughter

Numerous characters burst out laughing at various points in the play, but male and female laughter manifests very differently. The only female character to laugh is Minnie Wright, who starts laughing when Mr. Hale stops by and asks to see John Wright. Recalling the incident, Mr. Hale seems unsure that Minnie was actually laughing, saying, “I guess you would call it a laugh.” Similarly, when Hale mentions that he had come to ask John about installing a telephone, Minnie “started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared . . . I dunno, maybe it wasn’t scared.” In both cases, Minnie’s nervous laughter seems inappropriate to Mr. Hale, who sees nothing humorous about his questions. Minnie’s laughter also seems to disguise her emotions, confusing Mr. Hale and making the audience suspect that Minnie has gone mad.

The male characters also laugh quite a bit throughout the play, generally at the expense of the women. The running joke about Minnie’s quilt and whether she planned to “quilt it or knot it” causes the men to laugh and “the women to look abashed.” The County Attorney bursts out laughing when he sees that Mrs. Peters wants to take Minnie’s apron and quilt to her in jail. Notably, the women do not find the men’s jokes funny, never laughing along with them and complaining about their jokes in private. Near the end of the play, Mrs. Peters speculates that the men would just laugh at them if they told them about the dead canary. Ultimately, the women get the last laugh, turning the men’s mockery of feminine “trifles” against them.

Gender Separation

Although the play consists of a single scene, the male and female characters are separated from each other for much of the play. This physical separation allows the women to conduct their secret, unofficial investigation, and it also reflects the social barriers that prevent men and women from forming strong connections. Among the three married couples in the play, the husbands and wives lack any sort of connection to their significant other. Instead, the men ally themselves with each other, ganging up to mock the women throughout the play. Likewise, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters confide in one another, finding common ground in their experience as women and wives. Even when male and female characters do share the stage, they physically separate themselves along gender lines. At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters “stand close together near the door,” away from the men. When the men mock women for worrying about trifles, the two women instinctively “move a little closer together.” The Wrights’ marriage represents an extreme example of gender separation. Minnie withers away in the house because John Wright was “out to work all day, and no company when he did come in.” The physical and emotional separation between Minnie and John eventually results in the most striking form of gender separation: spousal murder.

Coldness

Physical and emotional coldness figure prominently as a motif throughout the play. The setting is described as remarkably cold; the night before John's murder, the temperature dropped below zero, frigid enough to make Minnie Wright’s jars of preserves freeze and explode. The coldness of the setting mirrors the emotional coldness of John Wright. Mr. Hale mentions that John Wright never talked much, and Mrs. Hale “shivers” as she compares his company to “a raw wind that gets to the bone.” Wright’s emotional coldness seems to have a chilling effect on the whole house, which is several times described as a “cheerless” place. Before the murder, Minnie Wright was sewing together a quilt, an object associated with comfort and warmth, but she never finished. When Mr. Hale finds her sitting in her rocker, he remarks how cold it is. Minnie answers, “Is it?”, suggesting that she is very much used to the cold.

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