Trifles and A Jury of her Peers

This research examines ways in which social experience informs conscience and behavior in Susan Glaspell's play Trifles and the short story on which it was based, "A Jury of Her Peers." The research will set forth the cultural context of the narrative and show how interpenetrations of conscience and social constructs in that context affect, explain, or justify behavior.

The social milieu of Glaspell's story is a decisive component of the narrative. In the drab farmhouse where the action of Trifles and "Jury" unfolds, all the people are decent and know their place and are determined to do a responsible job. Though Glaspell injects her story with humor, her subtext is chilling because the stakes are literally life and death. Also chilling, given how the narrative turns out, is that at the opening of the story, nobody is questioning the preconceptions of social organization that every character brings to the farmhouse. Yet the action turns on an upending and deliberate violation of those preconceptions. Not in the literal context of the Wright farm and Dickson County but in the abstract, as the actions of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters settle into reflection, do the implications of Mrs. Wright's behavior on one hand and the good ladies who gather her things on the other become evident. The main implication: that social organization, for all its power, can be fragile and may be transformed by social actors who have sufficient motivation for the project. The motivation: social organiz

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not socialized with the people in the small town where she grew up. Despite her lovely singing voice, she abandoned membership in the choir. Her shabby wardrobe embarrasses her into isolation. The attributes of her everyday environment--the stove she must cook in, the absence of a telephone, which would be a way of extending herself, and the scraps of cloth that she is using for the quilt--bespeak house arrest, a species of social alienation. Mrs. Hale looks around and sees how ragged and spare Mrs. Wright's clothing and kitchen are. The physical environment of the kitchen reveals Wright to have been stingy, reinforced by Sheriff Hale's story of Wright's refusal to get a telephone. Wright was close. I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. She didn't even belong to the Ladies Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn't do her part, and then you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby (Glaspell 11). The discovery of the broken birdcage and dead canary, with its neck "all--other side to" (23). What was apparently Mrs. Wright's only joy was brutally taken away from her by someone more powerful than she, which clears up any confusion there might have been that Wright was physically as well as emotionally abusive: "No, Wright w

Category: Literature - T