De minimis non curat lex

I took a quilt to class this morning not because I was cold but because my American Lit Survey students were discussing Susan Glaspell's "Trifles," in which a key plot device hinges upon determining whether Mrs. Wright was planning to "quilt it or knot it." To fully comprehend the complexity of the question, students need to know that quilts are made of fragments of fabric carefully pieced together, just as the play portrays characters trying to piece together a jailed woman's life based on the fragments she's left behind. They need to know that quilts are assembled in distinct stages, from cutting the squares to piecing the top to connecting the top to the batting and bottom, and they especially need to distinguish between different methods of sewing together the layers in the final stage.

And then, like good detectives, they need to look at the evidence presented in the text and see whether it's possible to find the correct answer to the question "quilt it or knot it?" If Mrs. Wright is still piecing the quilt top and has not yet started connecting the layers, how can anyone possibly know whether she was planning to quilt it or knot it? And if no one can know the answer to that question, why do the women in the play insist that Mrs. Wright was planning to "knot it"?

Knot what?

My students have seen enough CSI and Law and Order to know that evidence doesn't lie, but like the men in "Trifles," they don't always know what counts as evidence. There are no smoking guns in this case, no big obvious answers to questions of motive; instead, we have to pay very close attention to very small matters: a row of crooked stitching, a broken birdcage, a lump of rising bread dough. "Quilt it or knot it" could be a life-or-death question if the lawman on the case put his mind to it, but he can't be bothered to notice the difference because, as Susan Glaspell knew, the law does not concern itself with trifles.