Trifles by Susan Glaspell

At the outset, Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles (1916), via its female protagonists, proposes that establishing meaningful connections and friendships between women is the only path for gender equality to occur; critics laud Glaspell’s work for championing a “sense of sisterhood” (Koprince 78), a “total feminine community” (Alkalay-Gut 79), and “powerful female-centered networks” (Nelligan 87). In this article, I question notions of feminist solidarity by traveling in Part I back to America’s feminist roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the time of suffragism and the first wave (1848-1920). Part II, the majority of this article, revisits and offers a new reading of Trifles by challenging traditional scholarship (Ben-Zvi; Ferguson; Gainor; Hedges; Kolodny; Koprince) which reads the play straightforwardly as a feminist text. I argue, in the manner of Lisa Maria Hogeland’s influential work “Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the Willies,” that the play puts forward a notion of gender consciousness, which celebrates women’s sexual difference, but it does not advocate for a feminist consciousness which entails a political and social commitment to action and change.

Revue électronique d'études sur le monde anglophone 12.2 | 2015 : 1. La syntaxe du discours direct en anglais / 2. " The Dyer's Hand " : Colours in Early Modern England Abstracts Français English Produite en 1916 par les Provincetown Players, la pièce Trifles de Susan Glaspell, considérée comme la « mère du théâtre moderne américain », met en scène le dévoilement de l'invisible. Un crime a été perpétré dans la ferme des Wright et des officiels, accompagnés de leur épouse, viennent trouver les preuves leur permettant de condamner Mrs. Wright pour le meurtre de son époux. Pièce de détection ayant le clair-obscur comme principe structurel, Trifles est une oeuvre dans laquelle Glaspell littéralise la métaphore de l'invisibilité sociale pour dénoncer l'oppression par la norme et ainsi encourager les spectateurs à réfléchir aux sur les mécanismes qui sous-tendent la société patriarcale du début du XX ème siècle. Produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, defined by scholars as " the mother of the Modern American theatre, " stages the unveiling of the invisible. A crime has been committed in the Wrights' farm and the representatives of the law, accompanied by the wives, have come to find evidence to convict Mrs. Wright of the murder of her husband. In this detective play, the chiaroscuro effect appears as a principle which structures this work in which the playwright literalizes the metaphor of social invisibility to denounce patriarchal oppression and encourage the audience to reflect upon the mechanisms underpinning the norms on which the society of the beginning of the 20 th century was based. Mots-clés : visible/invisible, théâtre de détection, théâtre politique, féminisme

This study examines style shifting in an Arabic translation of Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles by Abbas Brashi. It presents an overview of the play, as well as its importance and relevance to Arab culture. It describes the different varieties of Arabic that exist as well as the one chosen for the translation, namely Modern Standard Arabic. The paper explains that the formal style of the target language text was chosen for the sake of wide readability and comprehensibility, as dialectal varieties of Arabic differ across and within Arab states and there is no standardised script. The other reason for the shift is to adhere to the norms of acceptable Arabic writing. The style shift observed in the translation of Trifles into Arabic is demonstrated in the translation of a number of linguistic phenomena, namely contraction, elision, subject-verb agreement, and figurative multi-word expressions. The paper concludes that the formal Arabic version of Trifles may later be shifted to different informal dialectal varieties of Arabic when it is to be performed on stage. Therefore, the formal Arabic version of the play may be customised or adapted to one or more specific dialects of Arabic according to the time and place of each performance.