Although
this story was published in 1917, it gained new attention after the rise in
interest in issues of women's rights in university classes. However, the story may also be worth studying
for the manner in which it illustrates the basic elements of the reading
process and the nature of the short story form.
The conventions Glaspell uses are from the detective story. The crime has been committed prior to the
beginning of the story; what is left to be done is to investigate and lay bare
the mystery by revealing the perpetrator and the motive for the crime. However, "A Jury of Her Peers"
combines detective story conventions with courtroom drama conventions, for as
the investigation proceeds, the "jury" examines the evidence and
pronounces a judgment at the end.
In
order to understand the mystery that lies at the heart of the story--the motive
for the particular way the crime has been committed--the investigators require
two things: a sympathetic understanding
of the characters and situation and the ability to discover clues. It is clear
that the men investigators do not have such an understanding, but that the
women do. The men go upstairs to
investigate what they consider to be the "scene of the crime," while
the women stay downstairs to take care of "trifles," which turn out
to be clues. A clue may be defined as a detail
that is relevant, that "makes a difference" or that "means"
something within the overall plot.
As
the story proceeds, the women, based on their identification with the accused,
discover details--the spilled sugar, the awkward stitches in the quilt, the
empty bird cage--that they determine to be clues. The men, on the other hand, think these are
merely trifles. This difference between
meaningless details and meaningful ones is an important distinction for the
short story form, especially in the twentieth century. Since Chekhov and Joyce, the short story
derives meaning from the transformation of seemingly trivial details into
meaninful details because of the role they play in the contextual mystery of
motivation.
The
quilt and the bird cage are the most telling clues, for the bird cage not only
points to a specific motive for the way the husband was killed, but it is also
a symbolic clue, that is, it is symbolically identified with the wife:
"she was kind of like a bird herself." The image of the bird in a cage, who has the
life squeezed out of it by the brutality of the man, dictates, at least in
terms of poetic justice, that the man must be killed the same way. The quilt takes on a similar symbolic importance,
for its many pieces from different points of Minnie's life make it a composite
history. It also refers to the process
of determining clues and putting them together in meaningful ways; as the county attorney says, "let's go
upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece."
The
attorney makes the problem explicitly clear near the end of the story. "If there was some definite
thing--something to show. Something to
make a story about. A thing that would
connect up with this clumsy way of doing it." And this indeed is the problem the reader
always faces--how to look at all the details, determine which are relevant and
which are not, and then rearrange them in a new meaningful way so that the
motive for the mystery can be laid bare.
A
tight, well-done film version of this story was produced and directed by Sally
Heckel in 1980. The film opens with
still shots of the exterior of the house which look like oil paintings of the
bleak landscape. After the body is
discovered, as is usual in the detective convention, the investigation begins
as the credits roll. Interior shots are
mostly dark as if to suggest not only the closed-in nature of the lives lived
there, but also the mystery embodied inside the house. Throughout the film, as the men condescend to
the "ladies," the women begin to uncover the clues and the sheriff's
wife, who at first is said to be "married to the law," gradually
disassociates herself from the letter of the law to affirm its spirit. The two women become co-conspirators in the
crime, as well as a jury of the accused woman's peers, who, by hiding evidence,
pronounce her innocent.
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