Literary Realism in GlaspellÆs ôA Jury of Her Peersö
In ôA Jury of Her Peers,ö Susan Glaspell describes ordinary people living ordinary lives. This is a major tenet of the realistic movement in literature, and will serve as a basis for defining ôA Jury of Her Peersö as a work of realism. That said, the argument can certainly be madeùand it willùthat the story is a work of a particular genre of realism, known as naturalism. In order to understand this idea, one must first understand the notions of realism and naturalism, and the tenets of these genres.
After the American Civil War, in the late nineteenth century, the mindset of the nation as a whole had changed. Consequently, artists, writers, and the like no longer represented life in the same way that they had before the war. Literature had been residing in an age of romanticismùwork that represented life as it should be rather than as it was in actuality. This shifted to the realistic manner of representing life as it wasùi.e. realism, and this is where such writers as Susan Glaspell emerged, creating work that rang true and honest to the lives of the middle class.
Within the realm of realism, an even more well defined, and perhaps bleaker strain of art and literature emerged. This would be called naturalism, and it is defined by its adherence to a sense of social determinism characterized by the work of such philosophers as Charles Darwin. Campbell argues that ôrather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalismö (Campbell http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/realism.htm). However, for the purposes of this argument, the definition of GlaspellÆs work as one of naturalistic realism fits, and certainly we can conclude that GlaspellÆs story carries undertones of a determinist philosophy, as Mrs Wright, being a woman, has no s...