Law and justice are facets of the democratic society that is America’s reality, and are an integral part of American life. The concepts of law and justice are nebulous to say the least, but their prevalence to life makes the discussion and clarification of these terms a popular subject for many authors. How an author may approach this type of topic is unique to each author, and Susan Glaspell approaches it with a feminist perspective in the short story A Jury of Her Peers. Glaspell based the story on a real-life event that she reported on, where a Midwestern rural farm woman killed her family with an axe for no apparent reason. The reasoning behind this killing was unclear, and thus justice and law were hard to administer in this case. Glaspell …show more content…
provides unique insight on motive; what it truly means, how motivation can be interpreted, and how it should be taken into consideration when carrying out law and justice.
She uses the setting of a lonely rural Midwestern farm to “reflect… a larger truth about the lives of rural women. Their isolation induced madness in many” (Hedges 304). This is the premise of how Glaspell examines law and justice. In the short story A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell, enacting justice versus following the law is explored through the author's emphasis on gender roles, which reveals the subjectivity of justice.
There are two female characters and twelve male characters in A Jury of Her Peers, and throughout the story, the gender roles of these characters are juxtaposed to express the divergent perspectives on justice by the men and women. To many, justice and law are synonymous with each other, but Glaspell uniquely separates them. Law and justice are separated by gender in this short story, as the men are focused on traditional law, whereas the women focus more on the motive and the context of Minnie Wright’s crime. Minnie, the woman who is thought to have murdered her husband, is judged by the women through their lens of understanding the strain of lonely rural life, while the men judge Mrs. Wright
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strictly by whether she committed the crime. This is where the distinction between justice and law are drawn, and this distinction is apparent only through the differentiation of male and female perspective. The way that Glaspell creates this differentiation is by defining the women in terms of their relation to the men when the women are just following the law and not enacting their own justice. A key example of this is when Mrs. Peters, talks to Martha Hale, where she is not named directly, but rather called “the sheriff’s wife” when stating that “the law is the law” (Glaspell 293). The reason why Glaspell chose not to call Mrs. Peters by name is because in this part, Mrs. Peters was associating with the law, and thus the men, as “a sheriff’s wife is married to the law” (Glaspell 299). Minnie, the murderess, is defined by her husband as well, as he “makes the rules she lives by,” which dictates her “existence and her behavior” (Alkalay-Gut 5). Essentially, the female characters are fully defined by their husbands when they follow conventional law, and “[t]heir behavior varies only because different men motivate different behavior” (Alkalay-Gut 5). Because all of the women are defined by their relationships to men, this brings them together as a sense of community, which uniquely gives them the ability to be the judges of each other’s actions. They took justice into their own hands by the end of the short story, and only then do the women get named, as they are breaking away from the interpretations of the crime through conventional law and becoming the ultimate jury of true peers. Throughout the short story, Glaspell meticulously chooses when to define the women by the men, and when to directly address the women by name to create this emphasis on gender roles, and their connection to their perceptions of law and justice. The emphasis on gender roles impacts the justice in the story because it leads to the men and the women viewing what the crime itself is differently. The men clearly see the crime as Minnie hanging her husband, and they are just at the house to collect any relevant evidence that may point to a clear motive that fits into their laws. Minnie’s crime is interpreted quite differently by Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, as the women are uniquely in the position to understand Minnie’s situation and can justify her motive in their heads. After finding evidence in the kitchen of Minnie’s anguish about being so lonely and oppressed by her husband, Mrs. Hale even exclaims “Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!... That was the crime! That was the crime! Who’s going to punish that?” (Glaspell 298). Mrs. Hale feels personally responsible for Mrs. Wright’s crime, as she was Mrs. Wright’s neighbor and should have visited her. These visits could have mitigated Minnie’s loneliness and feeling of being stifled and kept her happy enough so she would not have killed her husband. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale understand the reality of Minnie’s sad existence only because they can empathize with her as a woman, whereas the men cannot, and thus come to a different conclusion than the men about whether Minnie should be punished or not. The women overall see the real crime as Mr. Wright’s abuse and their neglect to visit and support Minnie rather than the crime being the murder. Glaspell does take a feminist perspective in this short story, but it does not mean that she concludes that “Minnie should be absolved on her crime because ‘of her sex’” (Alkalay-Gut 6). This feminist lens is not just excusing Minnie’s actions because she is a woman, rather it explains why she is justified due to her suffering. Glaspell goes much deeper than sexism, as she shows how the women in the story “shift… the very nature of criminality to an enforced alienation from society” and that Minnie should be exonerated from her crime “because sex and the understanding of the communal nature of identity and interrelationship of the individual alter their very conception of the crime” (Alkalay-Gut 6). Essentially, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale alone are fit to judge Minnie’s actions because only they can comprehend her suffering, and when they do, they shift the crime itself away from Minnie and onto her husband and her situation. The trifles that characterize the women and separate them from the men in this short story are what allow them to see that full picture of Minnie’s crime. Trifles are a crucial aspect of this short story, as they are what lead to a differentiation of law and justice between the genders. Throughout the text, trifles are associated condescendingly with women, as Mrs. Hale’s husband states “with good-natured superiority” that “women are used to worrying over trifles” (Glaspell 289). Mr. Hale says this after the women express annoyance at the county attorney’s rude scoffing at Minnie’s dirty pans and towels, the towels which he himself dirtied. In context this statement makes ‘trifles’ a distinctive trait of women, but not of men. The men’s dismissiveness of women worrying over the trivial things in life is what leads to their failure to a motive for Minnie to get her convicted in a conventional court of law. This “inability to see the facts of the situation is emphasized by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters’s ability to deduce the discouraging course of Minnie’s life over the previous 20 years” as the women find the clues to Minnie’s crime in the trifles of the kitchen and find justice in their own way (Bendel-Simso 293). The men fully do not “see [any] relevant clues in the kitchen,” whereas the women “notice evidence in the mere state of the kitchen” (Bendel-Simso 293). This juxtaposition of characters ability to identify and assess evidence is purely based on gender. It is highly ironic, as trifles are the ‘big clues’ that the men are looking for to convict Minnie in a court of law, but their disdain for looking at these exact trifles is what allows the women to find their own justice for Minnie—by protecting her from conviction. The symbol of the strangled canary clearly expresses gender roles and allows the women in A Jury of Her Peers to define law and justice independently. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters find a strangled canary lovingly tucked into a sewing box, and after a moment realize that it had been strangled. Mrs. Hale immediately remarks that “Wright wouldn’t like the bird… a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too,” outlining the similarities between Minnie and the canary and showing how they are synonymous in plight and conclusion (Glaspell 297). The discovery of the canary is the turning point where Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale decide to take justice into their own hands once they understand Minnie’s circumstances. They choose to conceal this crucial piece of evidence from the men, as they see this canary as a symbol of Minnie to justify her actions. To the women, “years and years of stifling, enforced solitude was in itself as form of murder that must be avenged [and] John Wright[’s] slow… strang[ulation of] Minnie’s spirit over the past two decades” is what is to weigh to determine the administration of justice (Bendel-Simso 294-295). To put it succinctly, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, “in light of this spiritual homicide…charged [John Wright] with—and found guilty of— destroying his wife creatively, procreatively, and communicatively” (Bendel-Simso 294-295). Charging Mr. Wright with the spiritual murder of his wife fully justified Minnie’s retaliation to the women, as they realized that the horrible treatment of her husband, culminating in the terrible fate of her canary pushed Minnie over the edge to kill. It was justice occurring naturally in the eyes of the women for avenging Minnie’s mental and spiritual death. Betrayal of traditional, male-dominated law is exhibited by Mrs.
Hale and Mrs. Peters in this short story, as they turn to an anomalous form of community justice. As mentioned previously, Mrs. Peters is the wife of the sheriff, and she behaves as such—abiding to the law always and nervously reacting when Mrs. Hale tries to verbally justify Minnie’s behavior as they uncover evidence in the kitchen. Mrs. Peters’s demeanor changes after Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale lock eyes and “h[o]ld each other in a steady, burning look in which there [i]s not evasion or flinching. Then Martha Hale’s eyes point… the way to the basket in which [i]s hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman” (Glaspell 299). In this instant of community and shared awareness Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters simultaneously choose to flout men and traditional law and do justice their way. By hiding the dead canary, the most damning piece of evidence that Minnie is the killer in a court of law by establishing a motive, they rewrite the definition of justice and disassociate it from law. Their new definition is one that specifies what a peer is further to include gender and situation and considers trifles when making a decision. Mrs. Hale has an effective and amusing way of communicating this idea when she says “the law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove” (Glaspell 293). “without saying so explicitly, she proposes and equality of values and perspectives: the patriarchal, abstract
system of justice that the men in the room above them represent, and the system into which the women themselves are slowly, literally feeling their way” which is critical to express Glaspell’s message of the subjectivity of justice, as this relies on gender roles (Hallgren 296). Mrs. Hale equates the law being the law to a bad stove being a bad stove because just like how we know the stove is bad and still choose to use it, we do the same with the law. She acknowledges the flaws of law, and comes to the conclusion that to enact real justice, the more personal aspects are imperative to take into account. These more personal aspects are what only a tight community can understand in a person, hence why Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are the only qualified jury to decide Minnie’s fate.
Hale states “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles” (561). The same trifles he states women are worried over, are the trifles that if men paid attention to they would have plenty of evidence against Minnie Wright. In “A Jury of Her Peers” Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter basically decided the fate of Minnie. In “A Jury of Her Peers” Glaspell shows how there is criticism of a legal system that denied women the change of a fair trial by an all-man jury. They found evidence that the men could not find and decided “not to turn it in. All of this held a significant role in the story, but they are the ones that solved the case. In the play the sheriff mocks Mrs. Hale “They Wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it” (563). He also said something in “A Jury of Her Peers” on page 575 line 159. There are not many changes between the play and the short story. Most of the changes happen in the opening of the story when it is more detailed, as to where the play is all about action. If you are watching the play it is much better than the story because you can see all the action and
Kathryn Allamong Jacob’s “She Couldn’t Have Done It, Even if She Did,” reflects America’s history of inequality and gender stereotypes that greatly affected society’s mindsets, even when it involved murder. Lizzie Borden was an upper-class, gentile, unmarried woman who still lived with her father and stepmother at the age of thirty-two. Being an active member of her community and part of the Women’s Christian Temperance movement, she fell perfectly into her stereotypical role as a beloved daughter who, unable to devote her love to a husband, devoted her time and energy to the betterment of her community. Lizzie, being a wealthy and moral woman, could never brutally murder her father and stepmother, she was incapable of even thinking of it, or was she? Jacob’s story of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Borden in 1893 describes how gender stereotypes can influence the minds of a nation and how the public and media influence, male dominated court hearing, and refute of evidence all lead to Lizzie’s full pardon.
The females begin responding “stiffly” rather than “quietly”(7) as before. This adjective usage serves to support the speech even more by allowing readers to see the progression from silence to a bold rebellion in the women regarding their husbands, for “by hiding the canary Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are also going against their husbands” (Bee2). Indeed, this act was the major act of defiance that secured the women’s strengthened devotions to each other rather than their husbands. Peters especially undergoes a drastic transformation when she eventually joins in as “support of her fellow oppressed women” (Block B 1). When, at the climax of the story, the bird is hidden from the men in the sentimental tin box, Glaspell exhibits the tension with the selection of detail. She chooses to focus on the clammy hands of Mrs. Peters as she stuffs the tin away and the quivering voice of Mrs. Hale as she denies knowing any information about the crime. The descriptions of the seemingly miniscule and weakening objects around her house match the “quiet desperation” (Schotland 3) Foster repressed until it overflowed the night before. Considering that the adjectives show how burdensome it is for the women to conceal the evidence, it truly demonstrates how strong the relationships between them has grown based
In this paper I will explain and discuss the historical events that took place in a small rural town in early Massachusetts. The setting for which is Irene Quenzler Brown's and Richard D. Brown's, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler. I will explain the actions and motives of Hannah and Betsy Wheeler in seeking legal retribution of husband and father Ephraim Wheeler. I will also discuss the large scope of patriarchal power allowed by the law and that given to husbands and masters of households. Of course, this will also lead to discussions of what was considered abuse of these powers by society and the motivation for upholding the Supreme Court's decision to hang Ephraim Wheeler.
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.
Glaspell does not believe that the male gender could understand Minnie’s actions. She is wrong in this conclusion. Plenty of men would understand why Minnie was forced to kill her husband. While Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are right in covering up for Minnie, Glaspell is wrong in portraying all men as jerks. Now as we approach the turn of another century, we see that there are plenty of men at this day in age that would understand Minnie’s actions and cover for her, just like Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale.
Notably, one of the principal ideas presented in Glaspell’s work is the concept of gender roles, moreover, the notion of institutional misogyny present in 20th century America. These said ideas are fleshed out through the characters of the play. The play opens with the introduction of five characters: Sheriff Peters, Hale, County Attorney
In both of Glaspell’s pieces, the main character, Mrs. Wright, is accused of killing her husband. Minnie Wright was a farmer’s wife who didn’t have much contact with the outside world. The murder investigation took place inside her home. Three men are used to investigate the case and two women come with them. The women were no help to the men, but solved the case but also protected Mrs. Wright from any wrongdoing. The three men tried to find a motive, but the case remained unsolved. Susan Glaspell show’s in the two pieces how women are disregarded in investigative matters.
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.
In Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”, female characters face inequality in a society dominated by the opinions of their husbands. The women struggle to decide where their loyalty rests and the fate of a fellow woman. Aided by memories and their own lifestyles the women realize their ties to a woman held for murder, Minnie Foster Wright. Through a sympathetic connection these women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have greater loyalty to a fellow woman than to their husbands and even the law; this greater loyalty ultimately shows the inequality between genders.
In the story “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, Mr. Lewis Hale arrived at the Wright house to find that his neighbor, John Wright, had been strangled in his sleep. Hale asked John’s wife, Millie Wright, a few questions about what had happened. Suspiciously, Mrs. Wright’s dry answers didn’t add up. Now the sheriff, the county attorney, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Peters the sheriff’s wife, are investigating the house. Although Mrs. Wright claims to be asleep during her husband’s murder, the women conclude that she strangled her husband as evidenced by the broken bird cage, the slaughtered canary, and the errant quilt patch.
This should tip us off to the differences that the judicial system discriminates even in matters as important as murder or other capital offences. But within the subgroup of women prisoners there can be a distinction made between the representations of women more likely to be sentenced to death row, or in this case shown compassion while on death row. Hawkins describes this compassion as “typically extended only to female inmates who fit a certain predetermined societal profile of women”. This definition of “women” or “womanhood” is very interesting and deserves to be explored. In my past, I have a conception of women as being sweet and frail; basically incapable of doing wrong because they are too nice or too weak to do so.
The death of John Wright, to some, might seem tragic and unacceptable, but for one person in particular, Minnie Wright, it was beautiful and freeing. When you are oppressed and treated poorly your entire life, and your husband takes away everything that you hold dear, then something has to give. Can justice has been served in an unusual way? With the help of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, Minnie just might get away with serving up her slice of justice.
For centuries, women were often looked at as housekeepers of the household. It was rare to see women managing businesses or working for the government. Usually, men were the "power holders" of the society and tend to ignore many brilliant ideas from women. Overlooked and overworked, women are yet fighting for their rights to achieve the liberty they have today. Susan Glaspell wrote "A Jury of Her Peers" to secretly embed the unnecessary practiced culture of social structure and subjugation against women, females' forced labor, and the oppression on women in order to explain that society should stop overlooking powerful women and their extraordinary minds. Furthermore, Glaspell was a member of a group of intellectuals who questioned marriage