A Comparative Analysis of Themes in Susan Glaspell’s a Jury of Her Peers and Trifles, Essay Example

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) and her husband, George Cram Cook, organized an influential theatre company in New England during World War I, where she acted, wrote, and produced several plays and novels for most of the remainder of her life. Her work received critical acclaim. In 1930 she received a Pulitzer Prize for her play, Alison’s House (Columbia University Press, 2007). In this brief paper, I analyze the themes brought out in one her most widely known plays, Trifles (1916) , and her subsequent revision of it in the form of the short story, A Jury of Her Peers (1917). The two share a fictionalized story that emerged from a real life crime covered by Glaspell in Iowa during her early days as a newspaper reporter around the turn of the century (Bendel-Simso, 1999).

The story is set in the kitchen of John and Minnie Foster Wright. The home, a crime scene at the start of the tale, is being scrutinized by Sheriff Peters, a middle aged man. He is accompanied by his wife, Mrs. Peters, who is a small woman, the young Dickson County Attorney, and Mr. and Mrs. Hale, neighbors of the Wrights. The day before, Mrs. Wright had been arrested for the murder of her husband, whose strangulation had been discovered by Mr. Hale and his oldest son, Harry, and reported to the authorities.

Several themes emerge from her story. First is the theme of apparent male dominance in society during the time in which the play is set. Early on, it is obvious that Mrs. Wright is the only suspect, so the men are at the home to look for evidence that would make her more culpable. All they need is a strong motive that would tie her up at trial for a conviction. The women, the “weaker” sex, are relegated to gathering a few of Mrs. Wright’s things so that she might have them while she waited in jail. As the dramatic actions unfold, it is clear that the women are the only ones who are finding evidence as the men make occasional passes by them, accompanied by comments that belittle their importance to the case. For example, they laugh as they hear the ladies trying to discern whether Mrs. Wright was going to “quilt” or “knot” her current quilting project. Further, they find it humorous that the ladies would ask them if they wanted to inspect the things they had accumulated to take to Mrs. Wright in jail. A sheriff’s wife is “married to the law,” they say. .

Another pronounced theme is the imagery of “voice” as it relates to Mrs. Wright, her canary, and Mr. Wright. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale speak of a time, twenty years before, when Mrs. Wright, née Minnie Foster, who had a fine singing voice, sang in the local church choir before her marriage. Since her marriage to Mr. Wright, a “hard man,” her voice had been silenced as she became more reclusive with the passage of time. The investigating women at the Wright home learn, deductively, that Mrs. Wright had a canary, and that canary’s cage had been torn from one of its hinges, and that the canary’s neck had been broken. They discovered it carefully placed inside a childhood treasure box that Mrs. Wright had kept in her sewing bin. The box represents the promise of her earlier days. The presence of the canary there is significant, because it shows the end of the pet that sang for her long after she could no longer sing for herself. The fact the Mr. Wright had been strangled to death is symbolic that he, too, could no longer use his voice to usurp her will.

A third theme surrounds the dilemma of doing what is right, even if doing what is right is not considered to be proper protocol. What is meant by this is that the women eventually know Mrs. Wright is guilty, and, because of their own life experiences of childhood torment and human loss, they find themselves unable to use their own voices to openly accuse Mrs. Wright of any wrongdoing. In the latter stages of the drama they communicate more with looks than with words. They tacitly understand that they cannot say aloud what they are thinking. They realize how ordinary things such as the Wright’s disorderly abode, spoiled fruit in canning jars, half filled kitchen canisters, and errant sewing stitches point to a woman who was disappointed with her life and reached the breaking point with the continual subjection she endured from her cruel husband. Cut off and completely alone, she lived without close neighbors, without a party line telephone, and they came to know that she could not live without the bird she had come to love. What did Minnie Foster Wright do? She killed her husband in a fit of retaliation. What did Minnie deserve? She deserved to be let go, released from her cage as it were, and given the freedom to fly that was denied her dear bird.

These three themes: male dominance, “voice,” and ethical dilemma, are developed, respectively, as the men continue to overlook what the women plainly see, the discovery of the bird and its fate surfaces, and as the women decide to exonerate her by their silence. If the story went beyond the boundaries given to it by Glaspell, the men would no doubt go on feeling superior to the women, Minnie would likely reinvent herself in some way, and Minnie’s ladies of mercy would go to their graves with the secret that they shared that fateful day.

The various elements of the themes deserve comparison. In support of the theme of male egotism, the reader finds Sheriff Hale saying, “Women are used to worrying over trifles,” when it is he who should be paying more attention to those “trifles” if he is to solve his current case. Mrs. Hale’s reflection, “The law is the law, and a bad stove is a bad stove,” is telling of her need to see justice served in this extraordinary event that has happened in this quite ordinary county.

The characters are developed throughout the tale. The County Attorney is developed as a man with political ambitions that go beyond his current office. The implication is that if he could successfully prosecute this case, it would cast positive light in his direction. Mr. Hale is portrayed as a well intentioned, yet clueless neighbor. The sheriff is represented as one who is overwhelmed with the responsibilities of his job. Mrs. Peters, the wife of the sheriff, recounts a time in her childhood when a bully killed her kitten right in front of her and how that horror would remain with her always. Mrs. Hale shared the horrible grief that was hers over the loss of her baby when they lived in the Dakotas. Even the unseen and unheard characters, the Wrights, were developed from the beginning to the end of the story. John Wright comes into focus as a man who seems upright and aloof yet harbors deep seeded insecurities. Minnie Wright, only called by her maiden name, Foster, by Mrs. Hale, is shown by circumstantial evidence to have had an emotional collapse under the strain of her dismal existence.

Other elements relate to the theme such as the way in which the Wrights physical distance from other people placed them in a world of their own where, as a childless couple, their estrangement from people caused them to become alienated from reality. Also, it is important to note that Mrs. Peters carried a sense that she was not an adequate wife of the sheriff: “Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife,” Glaspell adds, and she goes on to reveal that the former sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Gorman, was in every way as authoritative as the sheriff himself. Mrs. Peters arrived at the scene of the crime without influence, and she left there that day with empowerment. .

The play and the story have common characteristics. It is not surprising that the short story is more descriptive than the play and digs a bit deeper into the analysis of the characters. Both make the plot easy to follow. Both show the energy that the two ladies, Peters and Hale, give toward ensuring that their distant friend, Mrs. Wright, received the full benefit of their mercy. For this reason, A Jury of Her Peers is a much more fitting title than the original title, Trifles.  The play and the story are also different in that the play represents a more black and white scene to the short story’s more colorful telling.

In summary, Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers are brilliant examples of stories written at a time when the United States was experiencing the Women’s Suffrage Movement that gave women the full right to vote a mere three years before Glaspell penned this murderous account. To be sure, early audiences and readers of this work were shocked by omissions made by respectable women who chose not tell their husbands what they knew.    

References

Bendel-Simso, M. (1999). Twelve Good Men or Two Good Women: Concepts of Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers.’ Studies in Short Fiction, 36(3),  291-  297.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. (2007). Susan Glaspell. Columbia University Press. Retrieved February 17, 2010 from           http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0820966.html