“Biographical Influences on Glaspell's Trifles”

from “Biographical Influences on Glaspell's Trifles”
Elizabeth M. Evans

Susan Keating Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa, on July 1, 1876. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Her Midwestern background would influence her writing throughout her career After graduation from college Glaspell took a full-time position as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. She based her first dramatic play, Trifles, on an actual murder case she covered while working for the newspaper. Looking back she would later say that her experiences at the paper provided her with enough material to quit her job and begin writing fiction. While Glaspell had many of the experiences necessary for her writing career, her eventual relationship with George Cook and the Provincetown Players ultimately allowed her the opportunity to start this career.
Susan Glaspell was already a successful novelist when she met George Cram "Jig" Cook, a married man also from Davenport. While her relationship with Cook allowed her an avenue for accessing radical ideas, it also, paradoxically, embroiled her in traditional gender roles. A few years after meeting, they began an affair, and, in 1913, they married. Cook was a nonconformist who appealed to Glaspell because he could "enact the rebellions" that her class and gender would not allow her to participate in By marrying Jig "she would no longer be the conventional, unmarried dutiful daughter of Davenport" Yet Cook was "a practitioner of free love" who was difficult to live with because of his many affairs. Indeed he also sometimes drank to excess. It has been suggested that Glaspell would use her work as an outlet to vent the anger she felt toward Cook's behavior.
The married couple spent their summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and their winters in New York. While in Provincetown, Glaspell, Cook and some fellow artists put on plays for their own amusement, eventually naming themselves "The Provincetown Players".
In New York, Glaspell and Cook resided in Greenwich Village, an established colony of artists and writers. There, Glaspell experienced a major influence on her work. She was "living in a community passionately concerned with socialism and feminism . . ." and was supported by a group of friends who were intellectuals, socialists, feminists and radicals. Glaspell herself was a founding member of Heterodoxy, a radical group of women activists who were prominent in the feminist movement of New York in the years 1910-1920. It was within this atmosphere that Glaspell would be encouraged to create female characters who desired to free themselves from the stereotypical roles into which they had been cast .
According to Glaspell's recollection, during their stay in Greenwich, George Cook, needing material for "The Players" first season in New York, demanded that Glaspell write a play (Makowsky 24). Searching for ideas, Glaspell turned to her experiences as a reporter in Iowa, combined with her feminist philosophy and her life with Cook. She credits his influence for challenging her to change her genre from fiction to drama, and to "overthrow convention" in her form and content. The result is the play that she is best known for, Trifles. This work was re-written in 1918 as a short story entitled, “A Jury of Her Peers" On December 2, 1900, sixty-year-old farmer John Hossack was murdered in Indianola, Iowa. His skull was crushed by an ax while he and his wife were asleep in bed. His wife, Margaret, was tried for the crime and eventually released due to inconclusive evidence. Like Minnie Wright, the main character of Glaspell's story, Mrs. Hossack claimed not to have seen the murderer. The trial was attended by many of the town's women. Among them was the sheriff’s wife, who showed much sympathy to Mrs. Hossack throughout the trial despite having initially testified against her. Critics believe that Glaspell based the character of Mrs. Peters on this woman. Because women were not allowed to be jurors at the trial, Glaspell created a jury of those female peers in her short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” the short story adaptation of the play.