The Domestic Struggle In Mrs. Wright's Home

One of the first symbols introduced in the work, the rocking chair in the Wright’s home is deeply symbolic of Mrs. Wright’s personal and domestic struggle in her home and her marriage. Physically, the rocking chair is an ordinary household object that has a permanent position in the Wright’s home and in the daily activities of Mrs. Wright. Likewise, Mrs. Wright, as a married woman in the early twentieth century, was also an normalized feature of her home. All her duties as a wife and woman revolved around the homestead and her husband, providing a sense of permanence and a feeling of entrapment in her domestic life and marriage. Therefore, by murdering her husband, she challenges her role in the home, literally rocking the balance of power
Her physical attachment to the seat, as evidenced by Mr. Hale’s testimony, exemplifies the contradictory nature of being a woman, an object that is free to move and serve a purpose within the home, but that possesses no individual ability to move forward and progress, always being thrown backward by the same identity that moves her
Wright kept memorialized in box placed with her sowing equipment. While the rocking symbolized the domestic restictions placed upon women, the canary represents the societal expectations, or rather limitations, bestowed upon women in the same time period. Interestingly, Mrs. Wright and the canary share many similarities in the drama. For example, She and canary share many similarities throughout the novel. For example, Mrs. Hale and the other woman explain that “INSERT QUOTE”. While she is the same physically, as in she enjoys music and is considered submissive to her husband, as the canary was considered a delicate creature. Through comparing the woman to the bird, the symbol reveals what the men could not understand. In seeing her as gentle and submissive, like a bird, the detective and sherriff underestimate her abiliy. Simultaneously, as the men in the story are not subject to the isolation Mrs. Someone in her home and through the control of her husband and rural experiences, they are unable to rationize the emtions of the woman, as a cat stalking a bird cage does not see the world through the bars of the cage as the bird does. In this way, the bird not only is a part of the motive, but is the key to understanding the deeper penetrating motive within the story, the societal restrictions of