Susan Glaspell 's A Jury Of Her Peers

I have always felt that a good piece of writing causes the reader to think about and analyze a given set of circumstances so that he expands his worldly understandings. Such writing is stimulating and often includes an element of controversy. The short story “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell is one example of this provocation in which the writer conveys her views on sexual injustice. In a way that is conceptually intriguing, Glaspell expresses her ideas about the misunderstandings between men and women during the early twentieth century. While personally disagreeing with the interpretive outcome of the story as well as the message that it is intended to present, I must admit that it did provide me with insight into the mind

In Susan Glaspell’s, “A Jury of her Peers”, it is the women who take center stage and captivate the reader’s emotions. Throughout the feministic short story, which was written in 1917, several repeating patterns and symbols help the audience to gain a deeper understanding of the difficulty of prairie life for women and of the bond that women share. The incredible cunning the women in the story demonstrate provides insight into the innate independence that women had even during days of deep sexual discrimination. In “A Jury of her Peers”, the hardships women of the early twentieth century must endure and the sisterhood that they can still manage to maintain are manifested as a mysterious, small-town murder unfolds.

“You’re Convinced there was nothing important here…Nothing that would—point to any motive?” (Glaspell, pg. 5, 1908). In 1916, Glaspell worked for Des Moines daily news as a reporter where she later met her husband George Cook who was a play director. Together they wrote and produced plays, two of which are Trifles and Jury of Her Peers which are based off a crime scene she encountered while being a reporter. Glaspell’s plays are on the feminist side focusing on the roles women are forced to play in society and their relationships with men. Motive is the overall theme found in both versions of Glaspell’s story and is evidenced through the Wright’s relationship, the anger portrayed in various ways, and finally, regret found in Mrs. Wright.

In “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, Minnie Foster Wright is the main character, even though the reader never sees Mrs. Wright. The story begins as Mrs. Hale joins the county attorney, Mr. Henderson; the sheriff, Mr. Peters; Mrs. Peters; and her husband in a “big two-seated buggy” (188). The team men are headed the Wright house to investigate Mr. Wright’s murder. Mrs. Peters is going along to gather some belongings for Mrs. Wright, who is currently being held in jail, and Mrs. Hale has been asked to accompany Mrs. Peters. As the investigation is conducted throughout the story, the reader is given a sense of how women were treated during this time and insight into why the women ultimately keep evidence from the men.

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles, weaves a tale of an intriguing murder investigation to determine who did it. Mrs. Wright is suspected of strangling her husband to death. During the investigation the sheriff and squad of detectives are clueless and unable to find any evidence or motive to directly tie Mrs. Wright to the murder. They are baffled as to how he was strangled by a rope while they were supposedly asleep side by side. Glaspell artfully explores gender differences between men and women and the roles they each fulfill in society by focusing on their physicality, their methods of communication and vital to the plot of the play, their powers of observation. In simple terms, the play suggests that men tend to be assertive,

A spouse is a filter for how ones significant other is viewed by society. All through the ages women have been judged by their husband’s social standing. In the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, Mrs. Peters has to live a life of multiple roles because she is the sheriff’s wife. Having more than one role is a burden on Mrs. Peter’s, and her actions occasionally don’t comply with the ideals that are associated with and expected of a sheriff’s wife. Mrs. Peters is a very quiet person who tended to keep to herself.

“A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 illustrates early feminist literature. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, is able to solve the mystery of who the murderer of John Wright while their male counterparts could not. This short story had been adapted from Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles written the previous year. The play consists of the same characters and plotline as the story. In both works, Glaspell depicts how the men, Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale, disregard the most important area in the house, the kitchen, when it comes to their investigation. In the end, the women are the ones who find clues that lead to the conclusion of Minnie Wright, John Wright’s wife, is the one who murdered him. Both of Glaspell’s female characters illustrate the ability to step into a male dominated profession by taking on the role of detective. According to Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, written by Lois Tyson, a reader-response critique “focuses on readers’ response to literary texts” and it’s a diverse area (169). Through a reader-response criticism from a feminist lens, we are able to analyze how “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles depict how a patriarchal society oppresses women in the early twentieth century, gender stereotypes confined both men and women and the emergence of the New Woman is illustrated.

From beginning to end, Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” has several repetitive patterns and symbols that help the reader gain a profound understanding of how hard life is for women at the turn-of-the-century, as well as the bonds women share. In the story two women go with their husbands and county attorney to a remote house where Mr. Wright has been killed in his bed with a rope and he suspect is Minnie, his wife. Early in the story, Mrs. Hale sympathizes with Minnie and objects to the way the male investigators are “snoopin’ round and criticizin’ ” her kitchen. In contrast, Mrs. Peters, the Sheriffs wife, shows respect for the law, saying that the men are doing “no more than their duty”. However, by the end of the story Mrs. Peters unites with Mrs. Hale in a conspiracy of silence and concealing evidence. What causes this dramatic transformation?

This murder is one that the two women can identify with. The reason is that both of the women were farmers' wives and had very similar lifestyles. Mrs. Hale describes John Wright as a hard man, and never let Mrs. Wright do anything. I feel that this is just how she is describing her own life perhaps. The two women also find a quilt that is not stitched very well. This adds to the fact Minnie Wright was under some stress when sewing this quilt. At this moment Mrs. Hale begins sewing the quilt, the way it should have been sewn in the first place. I feel that Glaspell is giving the women a lot of symbols to justify the women's findings, and making it easy for them to foil the investigation.

In “A Jury of Her Peers,” Susan Glaspell uses the men’s belittlement and the women’s responses to show their differences. For example, when the men laugh about the women’s question of the quilt, Mrs. Hale responds with “our taking up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to get the evidence. I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about” (Glaspell 8). Seeing these differences bring the two women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, closer together. At one point in the story, “the two women moved a little closer together” in response when the men trivialize what trifles women go through (Glaspell 5). The women see things in the house that the men cannot due to the men never having to experience being in the place of a housewife. The men failed to see the little details that women could see. “Belittling the women, the condescending men exclude them from the legal investigation, doubting the women could recognize a forensic clue”, the men doing this causes their view of the crime to be incomplete, and they fail to recognize that the women were the men’s greatest investigators of this case (Kamir). Mr. Hale even completely ridicules the intelligence of the women altogether by saying “But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” (Glaspell 6).

In 1917, Susan Glaspell rewrote her 1916 Play, “Trifles,” into a short story called “A Jury of her Peers.” They both depict a group of townspeople investigating the murder of Mr. Wright. It is suspected that Mrs. Minnie Wright, his wife, is the murderer. As the story goes on, the women in the group figure out she committed the murder but decide to hide evidence to keep her from being convicted. Susan Glaspell wrote a short story titled “A Jury of her Peers” mirroring a previous play that she had written titled “Trifles.” There are slight changes and variations between these two that make them surprisingly different. By comparing the characters point of view, the way the story is introduced, and the plot we can point out key differences between

Susan Glaspell Works Perhaps the most notable difference between the two works is the change in title. The title of the drama, “Trifles” implies the inconsequential nature of the women, in the eyes of their male counterparts. Several times, within both works, the men regard the women as frivolous. In the drama, one of Mrs. Peters’ first lines is an explanation of Mrs. Wright’s concern over the state of her fruit preserves: “Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. She worried about that when it turned so cold.

In the play there is little room for detail and background information everything has to be assumed by dialogue and actions. The plot isn't nearly as detailed as the short story. One similarity Glaspell carried over from the play to the short story is her version of feminism. Feminism as portrayed by Glaspell in her two pieces is that women are not equal to men but more so superior. It is alluded that women are smarter in the way they notice the little details that convict Minnie Wright while their husbands miss

As this story begins, Mr. Wright has been murdered and his wife the star witness. The evidence is slowly breaking down their so called case. Women of this time period were not treated like men, a woman was only good when she was slaving for her husband and his needs. As Emily Dickinson once wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers/ that perches in the soul/ and sings the tune-without the words, / and never stops at all.” Mrs. Wright used to sing but Mr. Wright did not like that and forced her to a quiet. Mr. Wright was a bitter old man playing a gentleman; never taking a liking to kids he stole her hope for children, leaving her baron in her womb and her heart. He was a control maniac and demanded power in every aspect of this poor woman’s life; No Children, No Song, No Friends; she had nothing, which meant nothing to lose. In Susan Glaspell’s drama, “Trifles”, we explore the gender inequality between men and women of that time and why that has such a large influence on the murder investigation.

Peters and Mrs. Hale realize that Mrs. Wright had in fact killed her husband, but they don’t want to break their pact with Mrs. Wright and turn her into the Sheriff. Both women can’t believe what they discovered from looking at the tiny details. Mrs. Wright was one of the towns most respected women and she had in fact killed Mr. Wright. In the end, simply because both women looed at all of the little details, they were able identify things that the men would never would have found. Both Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have solved the murder of Mr. Wright by themselves. While the men are still trying to figure out what happened, they ignored all of the small things that made this unsolvable murder mystery, a solvable one. Together Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, both outsmarted the police, the men that were in positions of authority and even their husbands because they had the foresight to take notice of all the small details that men could not perceive. In the end, the women whose opinion didn’t matter, simply because they were women, were the ones that figured it all out. Even though in the end sex doesn’t matter, but one's ability to think logically and