Director's Notes for Susan Glaspell'sTrifles
by Ellen Locy
Trifles provides us a theatrical window through which we can glimpse the lives of women on the prairie at the turn of the last century.
Women in the midwest endured Indian raids, cold, a decade or more of childbearing, privation of all kinds and the aching sense of being
alone in an endless, empty land. Isolation added a new dimension to the difficulties of housekeeping: "If I had married at home in West
Virginia," lamented a frontier bride, "I should at least have had kindly neighbor women to turn to for advice, and stores to cover a few
of my mistakes."
Most women did their hard daily work, looked after their menfolk and raised large families. Regarding her husband, Oregon farmwife
Mary Walker confided to her diary that she would "feel much better if Mr. W. would only treat me with more cordiality. It is so hard to
please him I almost despair of ever being able. If I stir it is forwardness, if I am still , it is inactivity. I keep trying to please but sometimes I feel it is no use. May God help me to walk discretely, do right and please my husband." A later journal entry: "Rose about five. Had breakfast. Got my housework done about nine. Baked six loaves of bread. Made a kettle of mush and have now a suet
pudding and beef boiling. I have managed to put my clothes away and set my house in order. May the merciful be with me through the
unexpected scene." Then, without any apparent pause in the the account of her day, the entry concludes: "Nine o'clock p.m. was
delivered of another son."
Charley O'Kieffe, one of nine children, described the circumstances of his birth on a Missouri farm: "Mother herded cattle all day long
in the broiling hot sun so the children could attend a Fourth of July celebration in a nearby community. The next morning around two
am, I was born. No doctor, no nurse, no midwife, just Mother and God."
And, Annie Greenwood, a farmer's wife wrote, "The week Rhoda was born I cooked for fifteen men who had come to help stack hay. And
in the intervals of serving them, I would creep into my bedroom to sink across my bed. I was so tired. Through the bedroom window, I
could see the mare and the cow, turned out to pasture for weeks because they were going to have their young."
Elenore Plaisted, raised on a Dakota homestead, recalled her father's drunken, violent outbursts toward her mother, voicing
compassion for both: "Years later I realized it was the lonely prairie life, the deadly winter, and the need for sex refused by my mother,
unwilling to endure another pregnancy, that drove him."
But more painful than unwanted pregnancies, hazardous childbirth and the burden of raising a large family under primitive conditions,
was the terrible desolation following the death of a child, particularly an only child. The bereavement of Narcissa Whitman drove her to
the brink of madness. Her 2-year old daughter Alice was the focus and solace of her isolated life. "O, how many melancholy hours she
has saved me, while living here alone so long, especially when her father is gone for many days together," she confessed in a letter.
When Alice later drowned, her mother clung to the dead child for 4 days before allowing her to be buried. "She did not begin to change
in her appearance much for the first 3 days. This proved to be a great comfort to me, for so long as she looked natural and sweet and
I could caress her, I could not bear to have her out of my sight."
[July 2000]