SOURCE: “Generic Translation and Thematic Shift in Susan Glaspell's ‘Trifles’ and ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 489–96.

In the following essay, Mustazza maintains that when Glaspell adapted the play Trifles into the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” she changed the focus from the so-called trivial details of women's lives to women's powerlessness in the American legal system.

Commentators on Susan Glaspell's classic feminist short story, “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), and the one-act play from which it derives, Trifles (1916), have tended to regard the two works as essentially alike. And even those few who have noticed the changes that Glaspell made in the process of generic translation have done so only in passing. In his monograph on Glaspell, Arthur Waterman, who seems to have a higher regard for the story than for the play, suggests that story is...