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Susan Glaspell's 1916 play Trifles has long been regarded as a significant work of feminist drama, frequently appearing in literature anthologies and consistently drawing new scholarly interest. In 1981, Sally Heckel was nominated for an Academy Award for her film adaptation of Trifles, which was based both on Glaspell's play and on her short-story version of it, "A Jury of Her Peers." Phyllis Mael argues that the success of Heckel's film attests "to the vitality of Glaspell's vision":
Fifty years before the current women's movement, Susan Glaspell understood how consciousness raising could empower women to take actions together which they could not take as individuals, how as women share their experiences, they could act out of a new respect for the value of their lives as women, different from, but certainly equal to, the world of men. (284)
Glaspell's vision maintains its relevance and importance in its most recent incarnation, the film Legally Blonde (2001 ). ' The similarities between Trifles and Legally Blonde underline the continuity in women's issues: the importance of sisterhood, the need to provide options for disadvantaged or abused women, and the destructive potential of the objectification and devaluation of women by men. The differences signal a newer concern not found in Glaspell's work: the exclusivity of a narrowly defined feminism that leads to the objectification and devaluation of women by other women.
At first glance, Trifles and Legally Blonde would seem to have little in common. Glaspell's play is set in the kitchen of a farmhouse, and the main characters are two unimposing country wives, Mrs. Peters, "a slight wiry woman, [with] a thin nervous face," and Mrs. Hale, "comfortable looking," who have accompanied their husbands and the county attorney to the home of a local farmer who has been strangled in his bed (3). Legally Blonde is set at Harvard University, where the film's main character, Elle Woods, an ostentatiously glamorous young fashion merchandising major from Bel-Air, is in the unlikely position of starting her first year of law school. Yet the comparison suggests itself readily enough when Elle obtains an internship and begins working on the case of a wealthy Boston man who has been shot to death in his home; as in Trifles, the man's wife is...