A Jury Of Her Peers Literary Analysis Essay

Regret Alters a Life

Our future is greatly affected by our present actions. “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell casts a situation identical to this one present in Mrs. Hale’s life. Mrs. Hale, now a grown woman, struggles with regret triggered by the past decisions made over the course of twenty years. Throughout the short story, we observe Mrs. Hale as she realizes her regret and distinguish what thoughts and actions are a result of her feelings.

Mrs. Hale “…hated to see things half done…” (1) and is a very observant woman. She willingly accompanies Mrs. Peters and three men to John Wright’s house to comfort Mrs. Peters, demonstrating a caring personality. While at the house Mrs. Hale remembers Mrs. Wright, who she once knew as Minnie Foster. She then ventures into a foreign place and observantly thinks to herself that the “…rocker didn’t look the least bit like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before” (3) verifying her absence from Minnie Fosters life. Her thoughts of Minnie Foster create a growing feeling of remorse for her lack of attempts to carry on a friendship with Mrs. Wright. She begins to catch a glimpse of how lonely life in that house must have been for Minnie

Foster and wishes she would have come to visit. Mrs. Hale also notices the disarray of the house as the men do, but when they attempt to criticize the house, she jumps to Mrs. Wright’s defense.
Farther into the story, Mrs.

Hale becomes more taken over by her feelings of regret. She constantly defends Mrs. Wright saying “…I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen…snoopin’ round and criticizin’” (8). Mrs. Hale’s regret causes her to become empathetic as well as defensive. She finishes Mrs. Wright’s cleaning, curious as to what caused her halt, and begins to gather things to be taken to her. While searching for scissors, Mrs. Hale discovers Mrs. Wright’s bird in a box with its neck wrung. Though her curiosity gradually leads to the assumption that Mrs. Wright is guilty, she continuously backs the innocence of Mrs. Wright until she has no other option but to hide “…the box under the quilt pieces in the basket…” (15) to ease or possibly prevent Mrs. Wright’s

punishment.
Mrs. Hale supports Minnie Foster throughout the story, trying to assist her in any way possible. In the end, believing that she was guilty, Mrs. Hale says, with a deeper and more personal understanding of the connotation, she and Mrs. Peters believe Minnie Foster was going to “…knot it…” (19). Mrs. Hale never knew Mrs. Wright, only Minnie Foster, but continuously strives to make amends for the twenty years of abandonment of neighborly conduct and any kind of friendship they ever had, feeling that she was partially to blame for the loneliness and possibly the murder of Mr. Wright. Mrs. Hale’s regret that was built up through the past years, caused her to ultimately break the law to ease her guilty conscious.