A Jury Of Her Peers Analysis

"A Jury of Her Peers" was originally written by Susan Glaspell as a play entitled Trifles. She wrote the play in 1916, and a year later she rewrote it as a short story. Glaspell was inspired to write the story while covering a murder investigation when she worked as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News (qtd. in Annenberg). The theme of the story, the way men view the stereotypical role of women and the isolation created by society because of that view, is revealed as the other women try to figure out Minnie Wright 's motive for murdering her husband. This story takes us back in time to a place in our history where men and women played very different roles in their lives. In the end, all is revealed as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover
Although it is clear to the reader that Mrs. Wright murdered her husband, we look at her sympathetically because of the seemingly absent respect and love from her husband. Mrs. Hale described her by saying "she used to wear pretty clothes and be lively . . . one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that -- oh, that was twenty years ago." Even so, she is portrayed as a lonely and secluded woman with no children, no friends, and only a bird to keep her company. She is also portrayed as the victim of an overbearing and abusive husband, who didn 't seem to care or have the patience for his wife or her needs. It is clear that over the years she had been forced into a solitary life by the man she married. And it is also clear that she was finally brought to her breaking point. But we never hear Minnie Wright speak. While she is the central character of the story, and her motive is the subject, she has no voice, as was her life with John Wright. Mr. Hale reports what she said to him the day he discovered her husband 's body, and we hear singing that is recalled in Mrs. Hale 's memory of her. But there is the absence of Minnie from her home, the setting of the story. Although the women are only acquainted with Minnie -- Mrs. Hale purposely hadn 't called on her in over a year, and Mrs. Peters had only met her at the jail -- they were familiar and sympathetic with the difficulty of
They discover signs of abuse that only women would recognize, such as the broken birdcage and the broken stove, all symbols of Minnie 's broken life. While going through her sewing basket, they discover her dead bird wrapped in a piece of silk inside a pretty box. They theorized that when John Wright killed his wife 's bird, he took from her the only thing she had left in her life that she truly cherished, the last thing that made living with him bearable. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters understood this. They realized that an unloving, uncaring, abusive man had pushed Minnie to the point of desperation. It was in their hands that held the fate of Minnie. They were her peers, and they alone formed her jury. They concluded that Minnie became distraught to the point of total distraction. This is evidenced by the table being only half clean, the unfinished task of putting the sugar away, and in the untidy sewing of a patch from an unfinished quilt, although the stitching in the rest of the quilt was dainty and accurate. It was this very patch that covered the box that held Minnie 's bird. The image created between the death of the bird and the "death" of Minnie Wright 's spirit reminds us of the singing of bird and Minnie 's lost youth -- both gone before their time. When John Wright killed the bird, it was as if he symbolically "murdered" the last trace