Guilty or Not Guilty
“A Jury of Her Peers,” is a story about a farmer’s wife who is accused of murdering her husband. Referred to fundamentally as a writer, Glaspell's short fiction went to a great extent unnoticed until 1973 when her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers" was rediscovered. Despite the fact that the creator of forty-three short stories, Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" is her most broadly anthologized bit of short fiction and is dependent upon a real court case Glaspell secured as a news person for the Des Moines Daily. The story, which she acclimates from her one-enactment play Trifles in 1917, has pulled in the consideration of feminist researchers for its medication of sexual orientation related topics. On its surface, "A Jury of Her Peers" shows up a basic analyst story, however through broad exchange between two ladies, Glaspell gradually uncovers the story's actual underlying clash: the battle of ladies in a male-overwhelmed social order.
Notwithstanding recognized a feminist exemplary, "A Jury of Her Peers" analyzes the binds of ladies in a male-ruled social order. Faultfinders accept that Glaspell, who built this story with respect to a true homicide trial in which ladies were not permitted to serve as attendants, made a jury of those female companions in her story to allot their type of equity. A criminologist story on the surface, "A Jury of Her Peers" is to a greater extent an analysis about female persecution, equity, the restricting nature of inflexible stereotypes, and the contrasts in viewpoint between men and ladies. All around "A Jury of Her Peers," the men in the story never recognize Minnie Wright's persecution and how it headed her to an edgy gesture. The men in the story likewise see their wive...
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...hizing with Minnie, the ladies choose not to educate their spouses regarding the outcomes of their own examination. Rather, they repair the unpredictable sewing on Minnie's knit and prepare an anecdote about the canaries vanishing, accusing a runaway feline. In quiet plot, Mrs. Robust and Mrs. Subsides conceal the intimations that uncover Minnie's thought process, quietly absolving Minnie from wrongdoing without their spouses' knowing.
After going through the trial together as a class, I do not believe Minnie is guilty. As it says reading this story Minnie was too small to commit a murder like this. Going through the evidence they had and putting our thoughts together as a class, I found there is not enough evidence to make Minnie guilty. Minnie went through a lot of things with her husband being a farmer, but that does not mean she would have to commit a murder.
In A Jury of Peers by Susan Glaspell, the story revolves around the sudden death of John Wright. There are five characters that participate in the investigation of this tragedy. Their job is to find a clue to the motive that will link Mrs. Wright, the primary suspect, to the murder. Ironically, the ladies, whose duties did not include solving the mystery, were the ones who found the clue to the motive. Even more ironic, Mrs. Hale, whose presence is solely in favor of keeping the sheriff s wife company, could be contributed the most to her secret discovery. In this short story, Mrs. Hale s character plays a significant role to Mrs. Wright s nemesis in that she has slight feelings of accountability and also her discovery of the clue to the motive.
A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell is a story that reveals how women were subjected to prejudice in the early part of the 1900s. The story revolves around Minnie Wright, who was at the center of a murder investigation, and two other women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, who decide their own verdict and fate of Mrs. Wright. Even though the women were at the height of sexual discrimination, Susan Glaspell shows how a woman’s bond and intuition far surpass that of any man. The struggle the women faced throughout the story shows how hard it was for women to live in a male dominate world.
In Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” Minnie Foster is accused of killing her husband. This accusation forces Mrs. Peters to choose between the law and her inner feelings. Her husband is the sheriff of Dickenson County, Iowa. It has always been a small, quiet town where nothing really happens. Mrs. Peters is faced with an internal struggle.
Glaspell spent more than forty years working as a journalist, fiction writer, playwright and promoter of various artistic. She is a woman who lived in a male dominated society. She is the author of a short story titled A Jury of Her Peers. She was inspired to write this story when she investigated in the homicide of John Hossack, a prosperous county warren who had been killed in his sleep(1).Such experience in Glaspell’s life stimulated inspiration. The fact that she was the first reporter on scene, explains that she must have found everything still in place, that makes an incredible impression. She feels what Margaret (who is Minnie Wright in the story) had gone through, that is, she has sympathy for her. What will she say about Margaret? Will she portray Margaret as the criminal or the woman who’s life has been taken away? In the short story Minnie Wright was the victim. Based on evidence at the crime scene, it is clear that Minnie has killed her husband; however, the women have several reasons for finding her “not guilty” of the murder of John Wright.
Hedges, Elaine. A. "Small Things Reconsidered: Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury of Her Peers'. " Women's Studies 12.1 (1986): 89. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web.
Susan Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist, and actress. She married in 1903 to a novelist, poet, and playwright George Cram Cook. In 1915 with other actors, writers, and artists they founded Provincetown Players a group that had six seasons in New York City between 1916-1923. She is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography. She was a pioneering feminist writer and America’s first import and modern female playwright. She wrote the one act play “Trifles” for the Provincetown Players was later adapted into the short shorty “A Jury of Her Peers” in 1917. A comparison in Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” and “A Jury of Her Peers” changes the titles, unfinished worked, and
In Act One, Scene Three of Flyin’ West, Fannie and the other women who live in the house finally get to sit down with their sister, Minnie, for the first time in over a year, since Minnie married Frank. During this scene, Minnie’s abusive relationship with her husband is revealed. Minnie’s objective is for her sisters to ignore her husband’s abuse and bad attitude like Minnie does herself. None of Minnie’s sisters know Frank, since Frank and Minnie live in London and have never come to visit before.
Social gender separations are displayed in the manner that men the view Wright house, where Mr. Wright has been found strangled, as a crime scene, while the women who accompany them clearly view the house as Mrs. Wright’s home. From the beginning the men and the women have are there for two separate reasons —the men, to fulfill their duties as law officials, the women, to prepare some personal items to take to the imprisoned Mrs. Wright. Glaspell exposes the men’s superior attitudes, in that they cannot fathom women to making a contribution to the investigation. They leave them unattended in a crime scene. One must question if this would be the same action if they were men. The county attorney dismisses Mrs. Hale’s defenses of Minnie as “l...
Grose, Janet L. “Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’: Feminine Reading and
They looked all the detail even the things that the men overlooked. They started at the beginning and continued to look until they had figured out what had happened and why it had happened. The men were simply looking for evidence, while the women were looking for the story. It was the story that led the women to take evidence that could have convicted Minnie. The jury decides based on evidence and a confession. They didn’t have either so they couldn’t convict her. I think I agree and disagree with the verdict. It was clear that this man was abusing this woman in some way shape or form; however, I didn’t agree with how the women went about hiding the evidence they found. I think that it has a lot to do with the time period. I don’t think self-defense or insanity pleas were used the way they are now. It was clear that this woman suffered a great deal at the hands of this man and that she only did what she thought was necessary.
The central theme in “A Jury of Her Peers” is the place of women in society and especially the isolation this results in. We see this through the character, Minnie Foster and her isolation from love, happiness, companionship and from society as a whole. Not only does the story describe this isolation but it allows the reader to feel the impact of this isolation and recognize the tragedy of the situation.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
Women have lived for generations being treated as nothing more than simple-minded creatures who were able to do little more than take care of their husbands and maintain a home, but that idea is dangerous. The years of abusing women by withholding their rights, belittling them, and keeping them in the home was sometimes detrimental to not only the female sex, but to the males sex as well. Susan Glaspell is the author of the short play “Trifle” , in which Mrs. Wright, the housewife of a local farmer, is being investigated for the murder of her husband. As a local county attorney, sheriff, and male neighbor scour the house for motive and proof that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, the men spend much of their time criticizing the housekeeping skills of Mrs. Wright and belittling every woman in the play for their simplicity. Their assumptions about the female sex, prevents them from seeing the crime scene for what it really was. Meanwhile, Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, and Mrs. Hale, the neighbor man’s wife, are able to relate in many ways to the loneliness and loss of self that Mrs. Wright felt while spending her days alone tending to her home and husband.
For example, Minnie was stuck under John and she was never happy. Also no one ever truly knew as Minnie Foster, people only knew her for Mrs.Wright, John Wright’s wife. I honestly think that Minnie was never happy living with Mr.Wright. When that birdcage was broken and when the bird was killed by John Wright, I honestly think that was when Minnie finally came out and stuck up for
In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles Mr. Wright’s murder is never solved because the two women in the story unite against of the arrogance of men to hide evidence that would prove Mrs. Wright as the murderer. The play Trifles is about the death of farmer Mr. Wright and how the town sheriff and attorney try to find evidence that his wife Mrs. Wright killed him. As the play progresses the men’s wives who had come along were discovering important pieces of evidence that prove the men’s theory but chose to hide from them to illustrate the point that their ideas should have been valued and not something to be trifled. The very irony of the play comes from its title trifles and is defined as something that isn’t very important or has no relevance to the situation that it is presented to. In this play the irony of the title comes from the fact that the men find the women’s opinions on the case trifling even though the women solve the crime which ends up being the downfall of the men as they would have been able to prosecute Mrs. Wright if they had listened which made the women’s opinions not trifling. Glaspell was born in an age where women were still considered the property of men and they had no real value in society in the eyes of men except for procreation and motherhood. This attitude towards women was what inspired Glaspell to write the play Trifles and to illustrate the point that women’s attitudes should be just as valued as men’s and to let women have a sense of fulfillment in life and break the shackles that were holding them only as obedient housewives. Trifles was also inspired by a real murder trial that Glaspell had been covering when she was a reporter in the year 1900. Glaspell is a major symbol of the feminist movement of l...