This research examines ways in which social experience informs conscience and behavior, with reference to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and 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 each narrative and then compare and contrast how conscience-related issues are treated by the texts, with a view toward identifying ways in which interpenetrations of conscience and social constructs affect or explain behavior.
The social and literary milieus of Dostoevsky's novel and Glaspell's story seem so radically different that attempting to compare them may seem a fool's errand. Whereas Crime and Punishment is set in the urban squalor of the late-tsarist, pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, Glaspell sets her story in America's Heartland in a part of rural Nebraska where the good people of the town may be only dimly aware of the women's suffrage movement. And in the featureless farmhouse where the action of Trifles and "Jury" unfolds, all the people know their place and would doubtless regard the casual jauntiness of what Lord refers to as America's "Good Years" with a jaundiced eye and positively recoil in horror at the sight of a would-be intellectual. Equally, it is easy to conceive that Raskolnikov would regard the gathering of Nebraskans with a good deal of contempt.
Yet Dostoevsky and Glaspell present stories that are both about premeditated murder and the official investigation that follows. Although Glaspell injects her story with a good deal of manifest humor, her subtext is as chilling in its way as the psychologically grim and dense Crime and Punishment. Another attribute the narratives share is that the context for the action is the set of preconceptions that the characters bring to their experience based on the way their society is structured.
A good deal of theory has been articulated about the effect of social realities...