Susan Glaspell's Jury of Her Peers and James Tiptree Jr.'s Mama Come Home

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Susan Glaspell's Jury of Her Peers and James Tiptree Jr.'s Mama Come Home

“Jury of Her Peers” and “Mama Come Home” are two very different stories but yet they still are very much alike. The authors even have their own similarities and differences. Both authors are women, James Tiptree Jr. is a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who are writing from the feminist perspective. “Jury of Her Peers” was written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 and “Mama Come Home” was written in 1968. The characters in each story make some kind of change in the way they act, both show the feminist views that they believe in, and also each story takes place in a different time period with different groups in dominance.

In both the Glaspell and Tiptree stories one or more of the main characters make some kind of change. In “Jury of Her Peers” the two women that go to the Wright house with their husbands begin the story wondering what would ever possess Mrs. Wright to kill her husband. The women entered the house with the purpose to pick up a few things that Minnie Wright had requested from her prison cell. The longer the women are in the house, while their husbands are looking around, the more they find out about the state of mind of Minnie Wright. They find plenty of evidence of the change in Minnie’s attitude toward her husband and her life. The change in the way she was making her quilt shows that she was frustrated with her life or her husband. Later they find the dead canary and decide that Mr. Wright killed the bird and then Mrs. Wright killed her husband in his sleep with a rope. Mrs. Wright mentally changed with the death of her husband, and the bird and the two women changed their attitude toward Minnie after they find the evidence. In “Mama Come Home” a group of female aliens called Capellans come down to Earth. Tillie is a C.I.A. agent that had been raped recently and was having a hard time around men. Tillie looks exactly like the aliens except for the height difference. Tillie likes staying with the Capellan women because they make her feel protected due to their size. For most of the time that they are here she spends almost all of her time with them.

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