A Jury Of Her Peers Feminist Essay

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"A Jury of Her Peers", written in 1917, is a short story by Susan Glaspell, loosely based on the 1900 murder of John Hossack. It is seen as an example of early feminist literature because two female characters are able to solve a mystery that the male characters cannot. They are investigating the murder of farmer John Wright. The men tell the women to just busy themselves around the house while they go and do the “real work.” Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, use their deductive skills and knowledge about housework to conclude what had happened to Mr. and Mrs. Wright, also known as Minnie Foster. A skill the men couldn’t use or take into account.
The women find the one usable piece of evidence, a dead bird in a box. The story …show more content…

A comparative story is The Yellow Wallpaper by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The way that the narrator sees a female figure trapped behind the wallpaper, and she images that this figure shakes against the bars or lines of this wallpaper, trying to get out, directly corresponds to her own condition as a woman trapped and intellectually stifled by her husband. In "A Jury of Her Peers," there is a similarity in the way that women are obviously trapped and confined by marriage and having to work in their kitchens. Mrs Hale identifies the kind of lonely existence Mrs. Wright would have led and she and Mrs Peters piece together the clues that they in their position as females are able to identify as directly incriminating Mrs. Wright and showing that she killed her husband. She clearly admits that women suffer the same pressures of loneliness and the same struggles in life, and this is what she and Mrs Peters use to help understand how and why Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. However, there is no indication that Mrs. Wright suffered from mental illness. Rather, her act of violence was a completely natural response to having been kept in a joyless world by her husband for so long. The link between Mrs. Wright and the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not a shared mental illness, but their confined states thanks to their husbands, and how they suffer as a

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