Student Sample
Mrs. Julson
English III
Month Day, Year
Murder. Romance. Lies. Intrigue. These are the ingredients for a good story. In
both William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and in Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles, each
of these ingredients are found. But both of these stories cause the reader to wonder: is the
murderer in the right? Was this really a case of murder, or only of self-preservation? A
close examination of both of these stories reveals that sometimes, even a murder is not
really a murder.
In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the main character, Emily Grierson,
was the only daughter of a man of old money and prestige. Because of this, Emily has an
obligation in the eyes of the other people of her social class to behave in a noble fashion“noblesse oblige” (521). Because of this, Emily is forced into being an old maid. She has
a lot of young men come to court her, but her father turns them away because they are not
good enough for her (519). Some of the people of their own class think “that the
Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (519), causing
them to not really befriend Emily and her father. Eventually, Emily’s father dies.
After Miss Emily’s father dies, Emily herself becomes very sick. When she gets
better, there is a construction crew in town to pave the sidewalks. One of these people is a
foreman named Homer Barron. Homer is not of the same class as Miss Emily, but they
begin to see each other anyhow. The townspeople look down on Emily, feeling sorry for
her for falling from her place of importance and falling in love with a commoner (521).
Then, they feel sorry for her more when Homer Barron leaves town after the construction
project was completed, ending Miss Emily’s last hopes of ever getting married. Miss
Emily shuts herself into her house and doesn’t come out, only seeing the Negro who
worked for her and her china-painting students.
When Miss Emily dies, everyone goes to the funeral, some out of respect, others
to see the inside of the house. They go up to an upstairs room that has been sealed off for
years. There they find the decayed carcass of Homer Barron. It turns out that Emily had
poisoned him with arsenic, then laid him out on the bed that should have been their
marriage bed. Then, she slept there beside his body until it decomposed.
In “Trifles,” the main character is never really on stage. Rather, the reader gets to
know her by hearing the other women talking about her. Mrs. Wright was once a
beautiful young girl who loved to sing (1023), but she married Mr. Wright who,
throughout the play, is established as being “close” (1023) and wanting “peace and quiet”
(1020). The couple never had children, so there was little enjoyment in their home.
As the play opens, Mrs. Wright is in the town jail, and Mr. and Mrs. Hale, the
Wright’s neighbors, Sheriff Peters and his wife, and the county attorney are all out at the
Wrights’ house to investigate the death of Mr. Wright. Mr. Hale and his son had found
Mrs. Wright rocking in her chair in the kitchen, seeming very distraught. When Hale
asked for Mr. Wright, Mrs. Wright said that he was dead, and she said his body was
upstairs. Mr. Hale and his son went upstairs and found the body. Mr. Wright had been
strangled, and there was still a rope around his neck. They asked Mrs. Wright who had
done this, and she said that she didn’t know, and that she was a sound sleeper (1021).
Now she was being held in the jail, and the men were investigating the scene of the
crime. The women came along to collect some of Mrs. Wright’s things.
As the men are tromping around looking for clues to give them some motive for
why Mrs. Wright would have killed her husband-because they had to be able to provide a
motive in order for her to actually be convicted of a crime- the women waited in the
kitchen. When they first arrive, the kitchen is a mess. The dishes are not done, the table is
messy, and all of Mrs. Wright’s jarred food has frozen and the jars have broken. The
women also find Mrs. Wright’s sewing basket and a quilt she was sewing. They notice
that most of her stitches are nice and even, but the last line of them is crazy, like there
was something else on Mrs. Wright’s mind. There is also a dead canary with a broken
neck wrapped up in a pretty cloth in a box. The women notice all of these things, but
when they point them out to the men, the men just laugh at the little things that women
notice. These are the “trifles” the play is named after. They are things that are important
to women and that prove that Mrs. Wright had motive for killing her husband. Still, the
men cannot see this because they do not take women’s matters seriously, and the women
end up feeling sorry for Mrs. Wright and agreeing with her, so they keep their findings to
themselves.
In both of these stories, the main character, a woman, ends up killing a man.
However, in one case, it is actually cold-blooded murder, and in the other case, it is a
self-preservation. Miss Emily has not been able to be married because her father thinks
that no man is good enough for her. Because Miss Emily has no one in her life, she clings
to the people that she thinks she has. This is evident when she refuses to give up her
father’s body or admit that he’s dead for days after he dies (520). She holds on to Homer
Barron the same way. She knows that he is going to leave her, because it is well known
that he is not “a marrying man” (522). So, she goes and buys some poison, then kills him,
keeping him with her that way. In this, it is obvious that this murder was done for
selfishness.
Mrs. Wright, on the other hand, has been squashed down by her husband since
they were married. She used to love music and singing, but he likes silence. He is not a
bad man, but he was not really someone other people felt like they could be friendly
around. One day, Mrs. Wright bought a canary. Its music, the other ladies decided, must
have made her happy. Then, Mr. Wright killed the canary by twisting its neck, taking the
music out of Mrs. Wright’s life yet again. So, in the same way he killed the canary, Mrs.
Wright killed Mr. Wright. This death was not a murder so much as it was a way of
keeping herself alive. Mrs. Wright knew that she could not keep living if everything that
made life meaningful to her kept getting taken away. So, she took away Mr. Wright, who
had taken so much from her.
Faulkner and Glaspell create two stories, so much alike, and yet completely
different in their themes. Both stories deal with women who have committed a murder.
However, a closer examination of them both reveals that sometimes murder is in the eye
of the beholder.