In Trifles, discuss the ways that the idea that Minnie, the “oppressed” person is a willing victim in the play.I am contrasting this to how...

I would have to take issue with your idea of Minnie being
a "willing" victim in this excellent play. I think one of the major points about this
play and A Doll's House is that both plays try to present the
position of women in a patriarchal society and how it makes them suffer. Whilst of
course both Minnie and Nora get out by one way or another, we cannot underestimate the
profundity of their actions. What Nora did in Ibsen's play was incredibly rare, and of
course, Minnie, in killing her husband, chose a rather unorthodox escape route, perhaps
because she recognised that she had no other chance to escape. Whilst we can see that
Nora plays along with her husband's ideas and thoughts, the play is a gradual
realisation of how she is trapped inside a doll's house of her husbands making, whereas
Minnie in Trifles has in some ways a much harsher reality. It would
be worth your while to go back over this play and consider how her husband is described,
in particular by the other women who piece together the "trifles" that give us the
motive. Note how Mrs. Hale describes him:

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But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass
the time of day with him. (Shivers) Like a raw wind that gets to
the bone.

What is hinted at,
especially with the dead bird, is that John Wright was physically, psychologically and
mentally abusive, and kept his wife in a kind of prison. There is no sense that she was
a willing victim because that was the role society had cut out for her. Of course, her
only escape was to kill her husband.