The setting of Trifles is crucial to helping the audience understand Minnie Wright’s life and the reason she behaved as she did. In general terms, the characters state that the Wright farm was in an isolated location, distant from the road; this physical distancing contributed to Minnie’s limited social interactions off the farm. The clues to the murder that Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale decipher are items present in the kitchen of the Wright house, where the play’s action takes place. Both women notice items that their husbands overlook; the men’s offstage action is mentioned in the dialogue, providing information about the bedroom, where Mr. Wright’s body was found. While the kitchen is a place of physical warmth because of the stove, it also shows how Minnie had become detached from human warmth. Her declining pride and self-image are also reflected in the unkempt state of the kitchen, the uneven stitching of her quilt, and her old, worn clothes. The most telling clue they identify is the broken bird cage, symbolizing her husband’s tyranny.
She may not appeared in the play, but the viewer can deduct her mannerism by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters’ lines. According to Mrs. Hale, she knew Minnie Wright née Foster was a popular woman in her age and also likeable before her marriage. She loved to amuse herself with women-orientated activities and associate with other women in her circles. She harbored a love in traditional values of women like taste in music by singing and dressing gowns and ribbons, in which Mrs. Hale pointed out “ She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself—real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change..” In this line, she implied the difference between her personalities, how the marriage changed her. She became isolated and depressed by the pressure of housekeeping and the degrading value of women rights back then. The quilt she abandoned also point out a losing battle of effort to keep the sense of normalcy and “Happy household” as a farmer’s wife in countryside, which resulted in bottled-up mental disorder. She had a canary that accompanied her and also work as her semblance of peace and happiness in her marriage up until John Wright killed the bird. At that moment, her patience was snapped into pieces. In the beginning of the drama, Mr. Hale’s narration about how he found Mrs. Wright to Mr. Henderson also a big clue of her depression that eating her inside out.
Although Minnie is never seen on stage, the setting represents her and her marriage to John. The kitchen is cold, like their marriage. Her preserve jars are broken, suggesting barren feelings and lack of hope for the future. Her sewing basket, which should be a center of creativity, is instead used to hold the dead canary's body, which in turn symbolizes her happiness and singing spirit—shoved lifeless into a basket and covered in darkness.
When the men belittle the kitchen as just holding "kitchen things" they are, at the same, relegating Minnie to just being a "kitchen thing" of her own. In doing so, they overlook critical evidence pointing to the murderer. They disrespect the kitchen, as well as the things and people within it, which says a lot about many men's consideration of women at the time the play was set. Considering this, the fact that all of the action happens in the kitchen becomes even more meaningful. The murder happened in the bedroom. The men search everything in the house except the kitchen looking for evidence. A critical viewer would look at this and question the playwright's intent.
The setting contributes to the reader's or viewer's understanding by focusing our attention on "kitchen things" and what it means to be a woman. The women who stay in the kitchen and reveal the clues to the identity of the murderer use the setting to explore who Minnie is. They mention that they didn't visit as much as they should have, and as they analyze her housekeeping (or lack thereof), the reader or viewer gains insight into Minnie's plight.
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