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Elit 48 class #5
1. Spelling Error #4: Writing that something
has “peaked your interest.” We’re not
talking mountain climbing here. The correct
word is piqued.
ELIT 48C: Class 5
2. "I knew a peek at the peak would pique my curiosity.” While
that's not something anyone would ever say, it does illustrate
proper usage of three of the most commonly confused
homophones.
"Peek" (a verb and a noun) denotes a stolen glance: "I have a
present for you, so close your eyes and don't peek.”
"Peak" (also a verb and a noun) signifies the top of something: a
mountain peak, or the peak of popularity.
"Pique,” (French) (also a verb and a noun) : As a verb it means to
stimulate (interest or curiosity). As a noun, it suggests a feeling of
irritation or resentment resulting from a slight, esp. to one's pride.
5. Historical Context:
Women’s Issues
In many ways, Susan Glaspell’s success at the turn of the
century signaled a new age for women, and Trifles, still her
best-known play, represents the struggles women of her era
faced.
In 1916, the year Glaspell wrote Trifles for the Provincetown
Players, some of the important issues of the day were
women’s suffrage, birth control, socialism, union organizing,
and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.
Women had not yet achieved the right to vote (19th
Amendment 1920), and in most states women could not sit
on juries.
6. 1914: Margaret Sanger publishes the first text on birth control.
1916: Sanger arrested for opening America’s first birth control.
City life: Manufacturing jobs pay little for long days of work.
Pre-teens constitute a sizable portion of America’s workforce.
The factory system creates earning opportunities for women, yet
women earn significantly less than men, and most are relegated
to jobs in domestic service, textile factories, or offices.
Life for rural women was not much better. A large portion of
America’s population was still scattered in rural
towns, ranches, and farmsteads. Women were responsible for the
maintenance of the family.
7. Style: One-Act Play
The structure of a play affects all of its most important elements—
the plot, characters, and themes. The one-act play is restrictive
and difficult. With playing times of fifteen to forty-five
minutes, the number of characters introduced is limited, and they
must be developed quickly.
The one-act format tends to focus on a single location and a tight
plot. The Wright farmhouse, located in the countryside and set
back from the road, is a lonely, desolate place. The plot involves
seeking clues to suggest a motive for the murder of John Wright.
Note that everything that is said and done, from the way the
characters enter Mrs. Wright’s kitchen to the discovery of her
dead canary, relates in some way to the mystery at hand.
8. Style: Local Color
In the late nineteenth century, a style of writing known as ‘‘local
color’’ emerged. It is characterized by its vivid description of
some of the more idiosyncratic communities in the American
landscape. Writers such as Mark Twain created characters whose
speech and attitudes reflected the deep South These stories and
novels appealed to people in larger cities, who found these
descriptions of faraway places exotic and entertaining.
Susan Glaspell began writing during this age of regionalism, and
Trifles incorporates many of the elements of local color: regional
dialect, appropriate costuming, and characters influenced by a
specific locale.
9. Trifles is filled with a strong sense of place. The characters in the play are
deeply rooted in their rural environment. Lewis Hale was on his way into town
with a load of potatoes when he stopped by the Wright’s house to see about
sharing a party line telephone, a common way for people in small communities
to afford phone service during the first few decades of the century.
The lives of the women seem to consist of housekeeping chores, food
preparation, sewing, and raising children, with little time left for socializing.
The characters’ manner of speech reveals their limited education and rural,
Midwestern environment. They use a colloquial grammar peppered with
country slang. ‘‘I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s
being in it,’’ Mrs. Hale tells Henderson.
Still, at the same time that she provides these carefully crafted details of
country life, Glaspell provides her audience with ideas that transcend local
color. The struggle between the sexes, loneliness, and the elusive nature of
truth are all experiences shared by people across cultures and boundaries of
geography.
11. Themes:
Gender Differences
Perhaps the single most important theme in Trifles is the
difference between men and women, distinguished by the roles
they play in society, their physicality, their methods of
communication and—vital to the plot of the play— their powers
of observation.
In simple terms, Trifles suggests that men tend to be
aggressive, brash, rough, analytical and self-centered; in
contrast, women are more circumspect, deliberative, intuitive, and
sensitive to the needs of others. These differences allow Mrs.
Peters and Mrs. Hale to find the clues needed to solve the
crime, while their husbands miss the same clues.
12. Themes:
Isolation
The devastating effects of isolation—especially on women—is another
theme of the play.
The men seem better suited to the loneliness and isolation of rural
farming. John Wright, for example, is described as a hard-working
farmer who kept to himself. He did not share a telephone line, and no
one other than his wife knew him very well.
The women, on the other hand, are deeply affected by isolation. Mrs.
Peters remembers with dread when she and her husband were
homesteading in the Dakota countryside and her only child
died, leaving her alone in the house all day while her husband was out
working the farm. Mrs. Hale, who has several children of her
own, imagines how terrible it would be to have to live in an empty
house, like Minnie, with nothing but a canary and a taciturn man for
company.
13. Symbols
The Title Knitting
The Bird The Quilt
The Bird Cage The Quilting knots
The Dirty Towel The Women’s names
The Apron Minnie Foster
Mrs. Peters
The Jars of Fruit Mrs. Hale
The Telephone Laughter
15. Willa Cather
Born in Virginia in 1873. Willa Cather spent the first decade of
her life on her family's farm. In 1884, her family moved to join
her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the
Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for
several of her novels, including My Ántonia
Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red
Cloud, Nebraska. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma
of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent
excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense
pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to
the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there.
16. At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Her freshman English instructor gave her essay on Thomas
Carlyle to a Lincoln newspaper for publication, and by her junior
year, she was supporting herself as a journalist.
From Lincoln, she moved to Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and
newspaper writer. She then became a high school teacher, using
summer vacations to concentrate on fiction. In 1905, she published
her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden.
In 1906, Cather was hired to edit a leading magazine and moved
to New York City. Her older literary friend Sarah Orne Jewett
advised her to "find your own quiet centre of life, and write from
that to the world."
17. Yet, she found it difficult to give up a position as a highly successful woman
editor during a time when journalism was almost wholly dominated by
men, and did not quit her position for three years. In 1912, on a visit to her
family in Red Cloud, she stood on the edge of a wheat field and watched her
first harvest in years. By then, she was emotionally ready to use her youthful
memories of Nebraska. From this experience evolved O Pioneers!, the novel she
preferred to think of as her first. It is this long perspective that gives Cather's
work about Nebraska a rich aura of nostalgia, a poignancy also found in her
next Nebraska novel, My Ántonia.
Although Cather's 1922 novel about World War I, One of Ours, was received
with mixed critical reviews, it was a best seller and won Cather the Pulitzer
Prize. She continued to write until physical infirmities prevented her from
doing so. In 1945, she wrote that she had gotten much of what she wanted from
life and had avoided the things she most violently had not wanted—too much
money, noisy publicity, and the bother of meeting too many people. Willa
Cather died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947.
18. HOMEWORK
Read My Antonia (1918) Book I Chapters 11-19
Post #5: Answer one of the following prompts:
1. QHQ CHAPTERS 1-19
2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose a male narrator and why
women dominate the novel.
3. Explore the story or relationship of Pavel and Peter.
4. Compare and contrast the lives of Jim Burden and Antonia.
Explain what drew them together and enabled them to become
close friends.
5. Compare and contrast the relationship between Antonia
and Jim in Section 1 (Chapters 1-10) and Section 2 (Chapters
11-19)
