A Jury Of Her Peers: Law And Justice

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

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

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.