Trifles? From Susan Glaspell to Zitkála-Šá, by Way of a Norton Anthology

The cross-cultural scholarship of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Geonpul woman, in The White Possessive chronicles “a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession” that reifies both the white property-owning subject and its attendant formation, the white settler nation-state; such white subjects and states differ, historically and geographically, in form and in practice, yet the iteration of dispossession is structurally essential to these formations of whiteness.[1] In the introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, African-American scholar George Lipsitz acknowledges Moreton-Robinson’s work to emphasize that racialization in the United States, “is not a simple matter of Black and white,” and in fact relies on the originary and ongoing dispossession of Native Americans Moreton-Robinson chronicles.[2] Lipsitz’s discussion suggests, first, that hyper-visible anti-Black American racism paradoxically strengthens white territorial claims and depresses Indigenous history, and, second, that stereotypical black/white binaries promote delimited progress narratives that situate “white supremacy and anti-Black racism as forces from the past” and in the past (Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, 18). I note Lipsitz’s citation of The White Possessive because it explains, in part, the failure to read Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Zitkála-Šá’s “The Trial Path” as relevant to each other, even when the two works and authors appear consecutively in a teaching anthology, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. This short piece reflects on this interpretation gap as an institutional and historical effect of whiteness that reaches into syllabus construction, teaching practice, and anthology selections.

The story begins with a personal observation that, in 2018, 60% of the authors on my Women’s Writing syllabus still fell into the category “white,” and, further, that writing by women of color clumped at the end of the semester. My syllabus effectively modelled additive notions of modernist studies that respond to substantial critical interventions around race and whiteness yet nevertheless place white authors first. The deliberate revision of early course content to include Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) and Alice Dunbar-Nelson shifted my narrative—communicated through my text selections and lectures—of women’s writing, yet the class/instructor seldom interrogated white women’s writing for racial investments unless racism was glaringly apparent and, usually, anti-Black (viz. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, James Tiptree Jr. [Alice Bradley Sheldon]). Thus does genocidal violence against Native Americans rest in the background—in the Midwestern ground—of Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles, but because there is no explicitly racist content in the play, race has not been considered relevant in its interpretation. Situational irony and radical potential emerge in anthology construction: Glaspell immediately follows Zitkála-Šá (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) in the Norton anthology’s table of contents. Manifesting their geographical and historical connections surfaces whiteness as an effaced racial investment in Trifles that directly impinges on Zitkála-Šá’s activism and writing.

Trifles, “a small feminist classic,” anchored my course because it articulates common feminist concerns: Vulnerability to domestic violence, female friendship, denigration of women’s intellects, and the exclusion of women from professional and political hierarchies. This well-known play pits feminist solidarity against misogynistic law and order: two women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, conceal evidence that a third woman, Mrs. Wright, killed her abusive husband. But its geographical references reveal that the categories American woman and feminist are white possessions and positions.[3] The turning point for Trifles’s feminist sisterhood occurs  when Mrs. Peters reflects on the death of her two-year-old son while she “homesteaded in Dakota.”[4] Mrs. Peters earns sympathy for her sacrificial frontier maternity, but juxtaposing this reference to the Dakotas with Zitkála-Šá’s experiences in the same landscape reveals the dangers of validating one white woman’s grief as universal out of historical context. What seems an incidental detail for this play is the proverbial iceberg tip pointing to another history of grief and suffering, one unacknowledged by the politics of feminist solidarity in this play. Simultaneously with the events of Trifles, for example, the United States government was systematically removing Native American children from their parents to distant assimilationist boarding schools, where the children often died.[5] Teaching Trifles as feminist without acknowledging these limitations runs the risk of reifying, with the authority of higher education, the “epistemic dispossession or displacement” of  Native Americans in the history of the United States.[6]

Further, Glaspell changed details from the events on which Trifles is based when she fictionalized them, and these changes both obscure Native American references (if stereotypical ones) and promote lynching as a viable form of white female self-defense at a time when white femininity was weaponized to persecute Black and brown men. Trifles is based on a murder trial Glaspell covered for the Des Moines Daily News in 1900; the murderer used “an ax” that also killed a turkey “about Thanksgiving time.”[7] The Thanksgiving reference disappears in Trifles, and the axe is displaced and transmuted: it turns into a hatchet with which a boy kills Mrs. Peters’s kitten. Poetic license has political effects, erasing a collective burden of history that preserves whiteness as a determining category in whose suffering counts as American and female. In other words, assuming accused murderer Mrs. Wright did strangle her husband with a rope, the play signifies over Native American dispossession to consolidate feminist alliances around maternal rage, then signifies over a racist history of extra-judiciary lynching to validate Mrs. Wright’s actions, and finally celebrates white femininity as protective in a male-dominated legal system.

The proximity of Susan Glaspell and Zitkála-Šá in the Norton Anthology becomes anything but trifling in this light. The neighborly settings of Trifles and “The Trial Path” are compelling. Trifles is set in Dickson County, Nebraska—a homophone for the real Dixon County, Nebraska—on the border of South Dakota, close to the Yankton Reservation where Zitkála-Šá  was born and where “The Trial Path” is set (Hedges, “Small Things,” 52). How might Mrs. Peters interact with the grandmother or granddaughter in “The Trial Path”?

Historian Margaret D. Jacobs suggests an answer when she chronicles the complicity of frontier white women in policing Indigenous bodies, claiming further that subsequent feminist history has “reinforced, not challenged, settler colonial narratives” in celebrating white women pioneers.[8] Zitkála-Šá’s activism and work illuminates the cloaked whiteness in this play and specifies its feminism as white. Zitkála-Šá  detailed the mistreatment of Native Americans and advocated for reparative actions in her work as editor for the American Indian Magazine.[9] Zitkála-Šá  also published works that could crack the individuated fishbowls in which these two texts appear to sit.[10] The setting of “The Trial Path” is insular and almost ahistorical: the interior of a tepee at night, with a star visible “at the smoke-hole,” juxtaposes cozy isolation with cosmic infinity.[11]  Section III of Zitkála-Šá’s “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” by comparison, offers a similar setting with contemporary historical reference: the narrator sits with her mother “in the dim starlight, in front of our wigwam,” but they contemplate “the shrinking limits of the village” due to the incursions of white settlers, whose homes are represented by “more and more twinkling lights” in the distance.[12] I do not dispute the value of “The Trial Path,” and anthology editors face financial and legal limits that shape content selection, but the observation that anthology selections skew interpretive lenses is nevertheless relevant.

Failure to mark Trifles’s white settler geography enables another form of historical blindness related to higher education. Dixon/Dickson County is made from land ceded to the United States government by the Omaha in 1854. The Morrill Act of 1862 permitted the government to offer parcels of ceded lands to colleges, which sold the land to fund their endowments. The Pennsylvania State University, where I teach, sold five parcels from Dixon County    among the 780,000 acres sold between 1865 and 1867, building the endowment by an amount worth about $7.8 million today.[13] In Penn State’s official history, Michael Bezilla assesses the original profits earned as disappointingly low, a disturbing judgment considering the costs to Native Americans then and now.[14]

The campus where I teach Glaspell and Zitkála-Šá sits approximately 35 miles from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School where Zitkála-Šá learned and taught. Most Penn State campuses are on land once inhabited by the Susquehannock, but as European immigrants dominated Pennsylvania’s population by the mid-nineteenth century, it is possible to think Penn State unimplicated in events on the so-called frontier. Local absence and geographic distance disguise Penn State’s double debt to Native American people because Morrill Act land came from far beyond Pennsylvania’s borders. Penn State’s first “Acknowledgement of Land” (2021) obscures this debt by referencing “original homelands,” confounding geographical location with “land-grant” status.[15] This unclear statement contributes to misunderstandings of Penn State’s role in this history of dispossession and could create difficulties in clarifying collective responsibility among those who benefit directly or indirectly. The latter category includes the Modernist Studies Association, which held its first annual conference at Penn State in 1999.

The interpretive gap described by Moreton-Robinson and Lipsitz, cited in the opening paragraph, illustrates the reinforcement of whiteness as norm—if a diversely implemented one—across culture, time, and space. “Unsettling” this monumental effort is neither the work of a moment nor a metaphorical game; changing a syllabus has not merely been about substituting texts but reconfiguring the place from which I speak, and it is an iterative process.[16] Gaining traction on whiteness as a historicized, racialized position, as an investment in racialized power, requires intention and attention because it otherwise can easily resettle into psychosocial and institutional structures that effortlessly support it.