The Pain of Going Unnoticed: Common Theme in Trifles and "The Disappearance"
             Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance" were written seventy-nine years apart, and yet they share common themes, and some similar technical styles even though the first is a play and the latter is a short story. Trifles was written in a time when women were just beginning to realize that their roles kept them subordinate to their husbands. "The Disappearance" was written in modern times when those of the current generation in the United States expect that men and women should have equal opportunity to share the pleasures of life. But beyond the obvious theme of gender power struggles there is the notion that people can be subjugated or even erased not just by cataclysmic acts such as murder, rape, violence, or natural disasters, but also by the day- to-day grind of routine acts such as ignoring an individual or failing to listen to their wants, all of which communicate to the victim that they do not matter. Such victims, who are without any sort of community support, may resort to drastic means to achieve freedom from the torment no matter what decade they inhabit.
             Both stories relate the impact a husband's oppression can have on a wife. The wives in each of these two stories come up with a means of breaking out of their oppression, one by murdering her husband and the other by abandoning her husband and son. Glaspell and Divakaruni both effectively show how oblivious outsiders can be to a person's suffering. They also show how the individual who is supposed to hold the most trusted position (that of husband and caretaker) can wreak the most harm and be negligent to their wives' wants and needs.
             In both stories the central female characters are never present and the reader hears about them through the narrator or the dialogue between characters. This te...