Martha Hale Book Report

     The short story and the play written by Susan Glaspell are very much alike.  The story takes place in an old country town in the early 1900’s.  Mr. Hale has found his neighbor, John Wright, strangled upstairs in the Wrights’ house with Minnie Wright, John’s wife, sitting calmly downstairs.  With John Wright dead and his wife in jail,

The narrator sets the scene; the cold kitchen of the farmhouse the day after John Wright was found murdered in his own bed with a rope around his neck. Nothing has been touched except a fire has been started on the stove to warm the place a bit for when the sheriff and the county attorney would arrive to access the situation and look for a motive. Mrs. Wright who had been found the morning before just rocking back and forth in the kitchen rocker and pleating her apron that lay on her lap, over and over

Hale, and Mrs. Peters. Mr. Hale was the first one to visit the Wright home after the murder, so the sheriff immediately questions him. Because this is a play the actors have to talk to each other, so the audience knows what’s going on. Another way that the play goes into an action way is the aloofness of Mrs. Wright. Whenever Mr. Hale was being questioned he mentioned his encounter with Mrs. Wright saying that he would ask where her husband was, and she wouldn’t respond and just sit there in her chair and knit. The men then go on to criticize Mrs. Wright’s housekeeping, after the men leave the women say, “I’d hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around and criticizing” (561). The short story has the same sentence except the short story surrounds that statement with an explanation of some of Mrs. Hale’s thoughts. For example, Mrs. Hale is described as having felt a strange feeling “then, as if releasing something strange, Mrs. Hale began to rearrange the dirt pans under the sink” (573). The play cannot provide description of emotions but shows them through action. “A Jury of her

She merchant was a term applied to females who were respected for their skills in commerce. There are many ways women got into merchandising enough 17 and 1800s. Most obvious was the family owned shop and they were expected to help with the daily running of the business. Through this experience she acquired many skills such as bookkeeping, sales and even exporting. This created in in environment in which the woman was out in society and exposed to the men's world. Compared to working in the home and maybe getting an education through a seminary.

The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, this book is intriguing. The contribution of the of the “HeLa cell” it created tremendous bounds in the advancement of science. However, the experiences were dreadful, the Lack’s family went through a lot of it to deliver this to the scientific community. The bias in American health care at the time were unacceptable, therefore, she experienced the atrocious service provided there by the people who worked there. Just reading about what she went through with the service from a hospital, she had a horrendous fever, the doctors wrote she was in acceptable health, this on any standards is unsatisfactory she went for help, is receiving inadequate care. This is unacceptable, discrimination just grinds my gears.

As the women walk through the house, they begin to get a feel for what Mrs. Wright’s life is like. They notice things like the limited kitchen space, the broken stove, and the broken jars of fruit and begin to realize the day-to-day struggles that Mrs. Wright endured. The entire house has a solemn, depressing atmosphere. Mrs. Hale regretfully comments that, for this reason and the fact that Mr. Wright is a difficult man to be around, she never came to visit her old friend, Mrs. Wright.

Prior to reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I had heard of the HeLa cells and their contribution to medical research, but I had never really known where they had come from. In fact, I had never even associated the cells I heard about with an actual human being before reading this book. I found the book intriguing in the way it interweaves the story of the Lack’s family with the scientific history, racial politics, and medical ethics. Not only did I learned a lot about the science surrounding the HeLa cells and the nature of medical ethics, I also learned about Henrietta and her family. Learning about the Lack’s family along with how much the HeLa cells have contributed to science helps to humanize the story and make it more than a scientific history and a

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a poor African-American woman that died from cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1950, but in the end it turns into religion and spirituality. I know that there are many religions, but do not know much about religion and how it can affect people’s lives. The book also shows how Lack’s family believes in God, the struggle of Lack’s family with the creation of those cells, how the cells got used by people, and the sad part when Deborah wants to know who her mother was and the Lacks family could not afford a health insurance.

Henrietta Lacks died on October 4, 1951, and she was only thirty-one years old. Henrietta was an amazing and caring mother. She had five kids of her own but they didn’t really know her mother very well. Henrietta death affects her whole family, but it affected her two kids Deborah and Joseph (Zakariyya) the most. They both wanted to find out what happened to their mother, but Deborah Lacks would do anything to find out the truth about her mother.

First I’m going to begin with Mr. Hale, I don’t think he was the main protagonist he was just used in the beginning of the play to set a foundation for the entire play in itself. He is the first person to actually discover that John Wright was dead so he was the one who has to give his testimony of the day’s events leading to finding Mr. Wright. I think if I were to use Mr. Hale in the film adaptation I would not only cast him as the character to find Mr. Wright but also as the narrator telling the story of how he got to the point where he is giving his testimony. There are two more characters that I want to describe here that are very important to this play Mrs. Peters (The sheriff Peters wife) and Mrs. Hale (Obviously Mr. Hale’s wife). I want to bring them into the spot light of being the protagonist because of how important they are to the play in finding the empty cage and the actual dead body of the bird leading to a possible killer of Mr. Wright. They are highly disregarded by their husbands and the county attorney which is unsettling but also very relevant to the time period in which this play was written. The time period of the play probably early to mid-nineteen hundreds can be told by the fact that only a few people were there for the investigation, along with the fact that the house is still warmed solely by the use of a single wood furnace. The fact that she canned most of her food could also be relevant however many people today still can food quite regularly. Mrs. Hale I want to use as one of the protagonists because she was the one who besides Mrs. Wright knew Mr. Wright the most and was the most saddened by his loss because they were apparently neighbors and she still never stopped in to say

As time faded away, so did Minnie's personality and charm. After many years of marriage, Mr. Wright is found dead with a rope around his neck in the upstairs bedroom of their home and all fingers point to Mrs. Wright. The story takes place in the Wright's home and we learn that Mrs. Wright has recently been put in jail. The Sheriff, County Attorney and Mr. Hale begin to search the house for evidence; they bring along Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to gather

By piecing together clues in the kitchen, the two women learned something significant about Mrs. Wright/Minnie Foster and who she really was as a person. Why would "just kitchen things" be silent to men, and yet provide clues to the women in the story? Because it is those trivial subjects that women have worry about every day and night for their family, and the emotional burden is slowly built up but men cannot see it. By all those half done fruits, and one of the quilt that seems especially ugly and odd, Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters the significance of the reason why Mrs. Wright could murder her husband by the those mental pressure reflected by the “just kitchen things”. 6. What did the women learn about Minnie Foster/Mrs. Wright?

Mrs. Wright is referred to when Mrs. Hale speaks of her by using her maiden name, when saying ?I wish you?d seen Minnie Foster when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the choir and sang.? The old rocking chair symbolizes Mrs. Wright as she has allowed herself to depreciate, just as the rocking chair has depreciated. ?The chair sagged to one side,? Mrs. Hale stated that the chair was not anything like she remembered, referring to the fact that Mrs. Wright has also changed since she

Hale both decide to make a joke out of a murder. By hiding the truth from the authorities, they could have received charges for obstruction of justice and received jail time ( Cornell ). The other viewpoint would be from the women in the story or possibly anyone reading it. After years of constant neglect and criticism, Mrs. Wright decided to break out the cage of a marriage she was in with her husband. Feeling for her pain, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale mock the men as they investigate the crime scene. By not telling the truth to the Mr. Hale and the County Attorney, the women are getting revenge on the men for the they have been treating them.