[In the following essay, Hallgren demonstrates how readers of “A Jury of Her Peers” are meant to collude with Glaspell-as-narrator in the same ways the female characters band together to mete out justice.]

Susan Glaspell's 1917 short story “A Jury of Her Peers” has been quietly stunning women readers since its reappearance in a feminist anthology nearly twenty years ago. A novelist and playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her novel Alison's House, Glaspell had been all but forgotten until her story was reprinted in Lee R. Edwards and Arlyn Diamond's American Voices, American Women. On the surface a detective story about two Iowa women who unintentionally solve a crime right under the noses of their officious husbands, who cannot see the very clues they're searching for, the plot of “A Jury of Her Peers” is an in-joke among women, who recognize the narrative's clues.

When the story opens, a farm woman, Martha Hale, is being called from her bread baking to accompany her husband, John, along with the sheriff and his wife and the county attorney, on a trip to the neighboring farmhouse where Minnie Foster Wright has been arrested for the murder of her husband. When John Hale had gone to see Wright the day before, Minnie had said her husband could not speak to him “‘cause he's dead,” and explained further that “he died of a rope around his neck.”¹ Today the small party that has come to Minnie's house to investigate the crime consists of three men and two women: Sheriff Peters, Mr. Henderson the county attorney, and John Hale, along with Mrs. Peters, who has come to get some things for Minnie, who is being held in the county jail, and Mrs. Hale, who has come to keep Mrs. Peters company. The men are looking for the crucial piece of evidence: “the motive—the thing that shows anger or sudden feeling.”

While the men search the barn and the upstairs bedroom where Wright was found hanging, the women are left to themselves in the kitchen and the parlor. Nervously waiting, they discover their own bits of evidence to solve the crime that has taken place. Essentially, Minnie Foster Wright has killed her husband because he has strangled her canary. At the end of the story the women hide the dead bird—the piece of evidence that would certainly convict Minnie Wright—from their husbands, the law. These are the “facts” of the story. In one sense, then, the story functions as a “who done it” battle between the sexes, and its initial delight comes from seeing the “little women” outsmart—out-intuit—the sheriff and their husbands.

Critics have noted the qualities of feminist mystery writing obvious in the text. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar place this story in a tradition continued by Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, in that the women “understand the crime even while they implicitly vindicate the woman who committed it.”² Annette Kolodny suggests that “the intended emphasis [in “Jury”] is the inaccessibility of female meaning to male interpretation,” pointing out that the men in the story lack the “proper interpretive strategies” to unravel the motive.³ She terms this blindness to a set of details “sex-coding,” and suggests that “lacking familiarity with the women's imaginative universe, that universe within which their acts are signs, the men in these stories can neither read nor comprehend the meaning of the women closest to them—and this in spite of a common language.”⁴

It's Lucy and Ethel triumphing over Ricky and Fred, and their solving the murder and then not telling is wickedly satisfying.⁵ Kolodny calls it a happy ending. But it's not a secret shopping spree that is at stake here; a woman has murdered her husband and will get away with it. This initial imbalance—that the life of a man, a woman's husband, even, could be equal to that of a pet bird—increases what should be the social outrage at the crime they cover up. At its core, this story is radically subversive in all it implies about the different experiences, modes of interpretation, and potential for power in men and women. As the title suggests, what Glaspell explores in “A Jury of Her Peers” is a parallel system of justice, one in which women can be judged according to context and truly by their peers. It is in this way an exploration into female ethics. Even more subversive, though, it reveals a vigilante form of justice, one enacted in secret, in unspoken collusion between members of a group who speak the same language in a way that eschews language. But it is not simply the plot that makes this story compelling. Its subversive power comes, even more importantly, from what Glaspell does with the narrative, which enacts between the narrator-Glaspell and her readers the same collusion she depicts between her characters.

The first scene in the Wrights' home sets up the differing perspectives of the women and the men in the story. The three men who represent the prosecuting forces of law—Sheriff Peters, who arrested Minnie and will conduct this investigation; Mr. Henderson, the county attorney who will prosecute; and John Hale, the testifying witness—investigate the scene of the crime. Glaspell sets these men up as figures of authority and expertise—Sheriff Peters “made it plain he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals”—only to undermine them. They don't see, don't understand, don't know. They come into the story only briefly at the beginning, at the end, and once in the middle, to stroll through the kitchen chitchatting pieces of legality and patronizing the women, saying there's “nothing here but kitchen things,” and giving “a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.” That they are looking specifically for female anger, the clue to the motive for murder, and are completely unable to see it, is the story's biggest and most resonant joke.

The county attorney, more derisive than dismissive, complains, “Dirty towels! not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?” and, with a disdainful and aggressive gesture that will contrast with the women's treatment of the objects in Minnie's house, he kicks some pans under the sink. In the same way that the man of law assumes he has an infallible sense of who is and isn't a criminal, this prosecutor presumes to judge Minnie, acting as an arbiter of excellence in the realm that is appropriately hers. (Elaine Hedges's research on the circumstances of female farm life and work, documenting the hours of labor required of a farmwife to produce among other items in the week's laundry, one clean towel, makes even clearer to modern readers what the impact of this identification would have been for the farmwives, pointing out the enormity of the over-sight, as well as of the insult and ignorance, of the sheriff's comment.)⁶ His remark invites the other two housewives to collude with him in his estimate, but they remain silent.

When Mrs. Hale remembers that Minnie had worried the evening before about her fruit, Mr. Hale, the expert witness exclaims, “Well, can you beat the woman! Held for murder and worrying about her preserves!” With “good-natured superiority,” he says, “women are used to worrying over trifles.” Whether arrogant, hostile, or patronizing, the men clearly feel they are in control and that the women's presence on this mission is superfluous.

As they leave the kitchen, Henderson says it will be all right to leave the women unattended because “of course Mrs. Peters is one of us”; he cautions her to keep her “eye out … for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive—and that's the thing we need.” As he leaves, Mr. Hale musingly says, “but would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?”.

The women, as it turns out, do keep their eyes open and it is with their eyes that they conduct their own investigation and carry out a sentence; the result, however, will be a collaboration with rather than a condemnation of Minnie's revolt, as they too betray their husbands. When the men leave, the narrator stays with Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters, in the territory that is Minnie's: the kitchen and the parlor. Without meaning to, and only because they unavoidably find themselves literally in Minnie Foster's place, the two women come to understand the crime, find the clues, including the dead canary, the all-important piece of evidence that supplies the motive for the killing, and come to their own verdict, reading the details of Minnie's life that tell her story.

In the same way that the house is its own separate world from the world of the barn, the system of those who live in the house is different from that of the world of the men. The sheriff and his men are interlopers in this territory, and their methods do not help them understand what happened and why. Because they cannot “see” the significance of the women's lives, they do not look for clues in Mrs. Wright's life, and therefore they literally cannot see the clues to the motive for the killing—the one crucial detail needed for a murder conviction in their legal system. The women's method is intuitive and empathetic. Martha Hale's first comment after the men have left is, “I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen … snoopin' round and criticizin'.” She recognizes the signs of “things half done,” in a sugar bucket with its lid off and a half-filled bag beside it, and thinks of her own kitchen, her own task interrupted. What the men interpret as inept housekeeping Mrs. Hale is able to discern as a process interrupted, as her own process of bread baking has been interrupted to come on this mission. Her identification with (as opposed to Henderson's judgment of) Minnie's activity tells her something.

Later she finds an erratically stitched quilt block and feels “queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try to quiet herself were communicating themselves to her.” This is passive investigation, possible only by someone who not only can understand sewing but also can get into the mind of the woman who sews. This whole scene is filled with examples of the two women's indulging in the pathetic fallacy as they read Minnie's life. The dingy red rocker “didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster”; the house itself looks “lonesome this cold March morning … and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees.” Mrs. Hale remembers Minnie Foster, “kind of like a bird herself,” “singing in the choir.”

Unlike Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters is not moved by memories of Minnie Foster, nor is she disturbed by the physical disorder of the house. What ties her to Minnie is similar experience, thinking of the work gone to waste when the preserve jars break. Mrs. Peters decides to take quilt blocks for Minnie to work on in jail, and it is this gesture of kindness to the other woman, and not the legal investigation with the intent to convict, that turns up the telling evidence of motive, for in the sewing box they find a dead bird, its neck broken, lovingly wrapped in silk and placed in a pretty box. Mrs. Peters, horrified, remembers “When I was a girl … my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could get there … If they hadn't held me back I would have … hurt him,” conjuring both the specter of violence in even a small boy and her own potential for violent retribution.

All along, Mrs. Peters, wife of the sheriff, has reminded Mrs. Hale that “the law is the law.” It is not until she identifies with Minnie that she has the resolve to join with Mrs. Hale in covering up the crime. When Mrs. Hale suggests how still it would have been “if there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still,” Glaspell notes that “it was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.” That something in women that finds itself in other women is making the case, without saying it outright, that Minnie's crime is justifiable.

Mrs. Peters responds with a memory of her isolation on a homestead in Dakota, when her baby died. Although she falters at this point in her reverie, saying, “The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale,” what has been building for her as well as for Martha Hale is a sense of unity with Minnie. In identifying with Minnie Foster, they break the principle of objectivity in crime detection. They are slowly allowing their values of what constitutes life to enter into their judgment. At one point Mrs. Hale says, “It seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!” again personifying a housewife's house; and Mrs. Peters counters, “But Mrs. Hale, the law is the law.” The subtext to the entire conversation is a debate about the ethics of murder, a question that in this case is not abstract; they are verging on being accomplices.

Caught in a moment of trying to work Minnie's stove (the meaning here is probably heightened if we think of March in Iowa before central heating), Mrs. Hale responds, “The law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove.” Again without saying so explicitly, she proposes an equality of values and perspectives: the patriarchal, abstract system of justice that the men in the room above them represent, and the system into which the women themselves are slowly, literally feeling their way.

At this point, they put on trial John Wright and the life-draining barrenness of living with him. When Mrs. Peters observes that the townfolk considered Wright a “good man,” Mrs. Hale grimly concedes that “he didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most … and paid his debts. But he was a hard man … like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” For these wives, a husband is indeed the climate in which they must live. She notes that he wouldn't have liked the bird, “a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” At this moment, when Mrs. Hale superimposes the image of Minnie onto that of the strangled bird, she names what Wright, in his enforced silence and poverty, has done to Minnie—“killed”—thus indicting not her crime but his. Seen in this way, Minnie's act is not only retribution for the twisted neck of her bird but also revenge for the loss of the one thing that brought contact to her life.

Essentially, “A Jury of Her Peers” asks us to understand and to condone the murder of a man for the murder of a canary; or at least these are the “facts” as the sheriff and county attorney would see them. These are certainly what the facts would be in a court of law, and, as Mrs. Peters has remembered her husband saying, things don't look good for Minnie Foster Wright. More specifically, we are to see how these two deaths are equivalent—that of a husband and that of a pet.

While the official police investigation has been going on in the upstairs bedroom and out in the barn, literally and figuratively both above and beyond the scope of the women's concerns, the narrative point of view has stayed with the women in the shabby and cold farmhouse kitchen, as alienated as these farmwives from the men who have appeared only once to joke about the quilt blocks, asking if they thought Minnie had intended to “knot it or quilt it.” Because the narrative voice has kept the reader in the same room with these women, moving as close as possible to their unspoken thoughts, the reader has done the same sympathetic exploration of Minnie's wretched, lonely life. The legal case the story makes is the same as the women's, and it is presented seductively rather than ironically, persuading us to become part of the sympathetic jury of Minnie Foster Wright's peers.

And yet, in real legal terms, the truth is that a woman has killed her husband and may not be prosecuted. In contemplating their cover-up, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are about to overturn the system not simply of justice but of conventional values, instituting a female system of ethics for that of the patriarchy.

Carol Gilligan's work on women's morality suggests that women handle the inevitable aggression in the world very differently from the system of laws and regulations our patriarchal society has created. Gilligan proposes that “if aggression is tied, as women perceive, to the fracture of human connection, then the activities of care … are the activities that make the social world safe, by avoiding isolation and preventing aggression rather than by seeking rules to limit its extent.” “In this light,” she argues, “aggression appears no longer as an unruly impulse that must be contained but rather as a signal of a fracture of connection, the sign of a failure of relationship.”⁷

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, then, in their empathy and their desire to help Minnie Wright—their “activities of care”—are doing more to “make the social world safe” than are the sheriff and attorney who seek to see Minnie punished. Also, if fracture of connection is the dangerous activity, then Wright's “crime” in this female version of an ordered and safe world is, first, his isolation and emotional abandonment of his wife, and, finally, his destruction of what did constitute her connection with something that would communicate with her—her canary. When Wright kills “the singing” in Minnie, he has fractured connection, which, according to Gilligan, is what makes life meaningful and safe for women; in this system of values, then, this is indeed a heinous crime: Wright is clearly wrong.

Gilligan also studies the ways in which women judge others. In describing the reactions and justifications of one participant in her study as she makes a moral choice, Gilligan says, “She ties morality to the understanding that arises from the experience of relationship, since she considers the capacity to ‘understand what someone else is experiencing’ as the prerequisite for moral response.” In generalizing about women's ability to judge, she cites studies indicating that “the moral judgments of women differ from those of men in the greater extent to which women's judgments are tied to feelings of empathy and compassion and are concerned with the resolution of real as opposed to hypothetical dilemmas.” For Mrs. Hale, the law may be the law, but in Minnie Foster Wright's case, that rocker and that bad stove, not to mention her bird, are the real facts of the case and the details that guide her judgment.

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters don't stop in their indictment of Minnie's husband; they judge themselves as well. Gilligan explains that “although independent assertion in judgment and action is considered to be the hallmark of adulthood, it is rather in their care and concern for others that women have both judged themselves and been judges.” Each time Mrs. Hale uncovers another aspect of Minnie's dismal life she is pained by the thought that she had not come to visit her more often; perhaps if Minnie had been less lonely she might also have been less desperate. Her guilt overcomes her when she invokes the young Minnie Foster, “when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang.” Glaspell continues the narrative to explain: “The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear. “Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while!” she cried. “That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?”

Again Martha Hale uses the term “death” to describe what Minnie's life has become, and she blames herself for having let Minnie “die.” Her understanding of the crime is that Minnie has died and that physically and emotionally harsh living can indeed kill someone. In these terms, Minnie was already dead before she murdered her husband.

Martha Hale concludes, “I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?” The “we” in this passage can only be female, for it is evident in this story that the men are not “going through the same things” that their wives are. It is because women “all go through the same things—just a different kind of the same thing” that they understand what they do about Minnie Foster Wright. The sheriff and the county attorney and even farmer Lewis Hale do not understand the life of this house, and so they do not “know” and “understand” what Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale do. At this moment, Martha Hale understands the bonds that tie her to Minnie and to Mrs. Peters; what she understands as well is that their knowledge cannot be spoken aloud.

Their entire investigation—their coming to figure out how Minnie had been interrupted in filling her sugar bucket probably when Wright killed her bird; that then in anger she had killed him in a way that matched his strangulation of the canary (and his metaphoric “strangling” of her singing, or the “life” in her); then had tried to calm herself by stitching on her log cabin quilt, producing the uneven stitches—has come about not through direct conversation and statement but rather through allusion and insinuation. Susan Lanser cites “A Jury of Her Peers” as an example of a text that demonstrates women's ability to speak in a “double voice,” two women protecting a third “from a conviction for murder by communicating in ‘women's language’ under the watchful but unseeing eyes of the Law.”⁸

In the following passage, Glaspell enacts her characters' “double voice” when Mrs. Peters points out to Martha Hale the badly stitched quilt block:

“The sewing,” said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way. “All the rest of them have been so nice and even—but—this one. Why it looks as if she didn't know what she was about.”

Their eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them; then as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat there, her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads.

“Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?” asked the sheriff's wife, startled.

“Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good,” said Mrs. Hale mildly.

“I don't think we ought to touch things,” Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.

“I'll just finish up this end,” answered Mrs. Hale, still in that matter-of-fact fashion.

The way they are acting and what they are saying are in direct opposition to the understanding they achieve when their eyes meet. Mrs. Hale is “mild” and “matter-of-fact” and just casually fixing a few stitches. What they both know is that she is destroying evidence and that she shouldn't be. Mrs. Peters, though not physically assisting, nevertheless colludes with this action, as her protestation is “a little helpless.” Even the narrative voice averts its eyes, pretending not to see the action itself, when Mrs. Hale “had pulled” a knot and drawn the threads, the verb tense shifting from past tense to past perfect.

After they have found the bird the women have another of their coded talks:

“I wonder how it would seem,” Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—“never to have had any children around?” Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. “No, Wright wouldn't like the bird,” she said after that—“a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

“Of course we don't know who killed the bird.”

“I knew John Wright,” was Mrs. Hale's answer.

“It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff's wife. “Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him.”

Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird-cage.

“His neck. Choked the life out of him.”

“We don't know who killed him,” whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. We don't know.”

When Mrs. Peters, here called “the sheriff's wife,” protests that they don't “know” who killed the bird or who killed Wright, she is speaking in terms of the legal system. Of course, they have not actually witnessed either event and so they do not technically, legally “know” for sure. But they have witnessed the life in the house; Martha Hale's response that she “knows” John Wright asserts her own intuitive interpretation of justice as well as interposing her own sense of what it is to “know” something, as when she asks, “Why is it we know what we know?” Mrs. Peters is “wild,” of course, because she uses “know” in both senses, the double identification utterly upsetting her; what is at stake is the possibility that Minnie's murder is justified.

In the same way that their investigation has proceeded by allusion, their verdict is passed without words. What is interesting here is that neither woman has ever stated the case directly: “Wright had been awful to live with alone for twenty years, Minnie killed him, and the dead bird is the evidence that would supply a motive and convict her for the crime. We don't want her caught, therefore we will help her. What we are doing is of course, illegal. Nevertheless, we are women, we understand this, we too are guilty of letting life go untended. We will never tell what we know.” The most direct they have been with language is to ask: “Why do we know what we know?”

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, married to the men they're married to, and in the house for the purpose that they are—to gather evidence to convict Minnie Foster Wright of murder—cannot speak what they know, for to speak would move them into the discourse of a system of rules they are by their silence and actions breaking. If they never say it aloud, then indeed, it is not public fact that they know who killed John Wright. For them to state explicitly what they know and what they could do would place them in the realm of spoken, public discourse, the world of convention, the patriarchal, male world. Further, they also do not dare to speak the truth about the crime because to speak it would disqualify the alternative set of values they are using to judge the situation and decide upon the appropriate action. Speaking the truth would bring their intuitive and feminine understanding out into the world that is structured according to the male perspective and explained in the language that is used to maintain that structure. There is no room in the legal system, or in the patriarchal system of the world that has created that system, for justifying a woman's murder of her husband on the grounds of pet-ricide and neglect.

And yet the women, who have felt Minnie's life through identification and through what they know of their own lives, understand and exonerate her and take action to protect her by hiding the evidence. Their reading of this situation and their intended action make sense according to their shared values but fly in the face of conventional, patriarchal morals. To speak what they know would bring them face to face with the subversive nature of their withholding of evidence. They have been struggling with their consciences all along, and it is only when they recognize and acknowledge that their “we” knows and understands something that is at odds with the system of their husbands that they decide to take an action that unites them with each other and against the legal system. As long as they remain “silent” they remain in the female realm and are not bound by the justice system in the patriarchal land. Thus they use language indirectly, to imply and suggest; the real communication between them happens with their eyes, or through their bodies.

When Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, relative strangers, are in the kitchen listening to Mr. Hale's descriptions of the day before and he excuses their concern for Minnie's frozen jam jars by saying, “Oh, well … women are used to worrying over trifles,” Glaspell notes that “the two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke.” This unconscious gesture physically allies the two women and prefigures the bond that will build between them as the story progresses.

Told to “look for clues” by the unseeing eyes of the law, the women always use their eyes to read the details of the situation. Martha Hale's “eye was caught” by a dishtowel on the table, and it is as if “her mind tripped on something; her “eye was held” by the half-filled sugar bucket; and Minnie's life becomes clear to her when “her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen” and it is as if she could “see what that kitchen had meant” through the years.

Mrs. Hale reads Mrs. Peters' reactions with her eyes as well. She notes that Mrs. Peters' eyes “looked as if they could see a long way into things,” and later, when they hear the men's footsteps above them, Martha Hale notes that “that look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff's wife now.” These two women use their eyes to understand what has happened, and they also use them to communicate what they are really thinking. They use verbal discourse to “tell it slant” or to disguise the truth they relay through their glances.

When they notice the irregular stitching on the quilt block, Glaspell notes that “their eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other.” When they find the mangled birdcage, “again their eyes met—startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred.” And when they come to realize that Wright killed Minnie's canary, Glaspell says, “again the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror.”

In the same way that the two women move physically closer to each other in response to the men's derision early in the story, they move together through their gazes psychically and emotionally as they uncover Minnie's story. The language Glaspell uses to describe this collusion is nearly erotic. When their eyes meet, “something flashes to life between them” and it is “with an effort” that they “seem to pull away.” Later, when their eyes meet they “cling together,” and, when the men enter the room, the women's eyes “found one another.” The bonding that takes place between them goes beyond the battle-of-the-sexes taking of sides that initially delights us in this story. This is a profound re-identification process. Both these women cast their allegiance with another woman and with each other, implicitly breaking the bonds of loyalty they have had with their husbands.

In fact, it is at the end of the story when the county attorney (who had at the beginning called Mrs. Peters “one of us”) suggests that she is “married to the law” that Mrs. Peters takes action to align herself with the other women, in effect divorcing the law. In prose that is rather more elegant than the rest of this farm-simple story, suggesting that the voice and point of view are Glaspell's rather than those of her characters, Glaspell describes their final decision:

Again—for one final moment—the two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it [their decision] rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff's wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching. Then Martha Hale's eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman—that woman who was there with them all through that hour.

There has been no discussion about this between them, only this slow, tentative identification and bonding, signified by their gazes. The images of physical positioning and of eyes as emblematic of the female perspective come together in this final visioning of the truth. Mrs. Hale's eyes “make” Mrs. Peters turn to her, and in this moment “they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching”; this is a depiction of rare honesty and truth and it certainly transcends the sense of “knowing” the women have with their husbands. If female connection is, as Gilligan suggests, the crucial element of women's psychology, then Minnie, the woman who was not there and yet who had been “there with them through that hour” becomes a third party to this intimate bonding.

It is then that Mrs. Peters decides to “do it”; she rushes forward and tries to put the box holding the dead bird into her handbag. When she discovers it won't fit, Mrs. Hale snatches the box from her as the men enter the room and places it safely in her coat pocket. At the story's end, the evidence showing motive has been hidden or destroyed, and presumably Minnie Foster Wright will go free. Nobody but them is any wiser. At the story's end, there are three men who are even more ignorant than they were at the beginning of the story, and there are three women who know everything. And one of them will go free—the woman who murdered her husband.

Overall, this seems a moment of triumph for the women. Some critics, however, disagree, casting it as a Pyrrhic victory, if any. Carolyn Heilbrun has commented that students reading this story in a class on women's narratives “saw the absence of any narrative that could take the women past their moment of revelation and support their bid for freedom from the assigned script.”⁹ Judith Fetterley also expresses the frustration that “the women are willing to let the men continue to control textuality in order to save the individual. … Minnie Wright is denied her story and hence her reality (What will her life be like if she does get off ?), and the men are allowed to continue to assume that they are the only ones with stories. So haven't the men finally won?”¹⁰

Perhaps we should concede that in this case, male superiority and the presumptions of the patriarchy go unchallenged in any overt sense; the women keep silent about what they know. But that is within the level of the story of the text, and even there a murderess is going free. In the world outside the text, however, the story seems even more subversive because of this intact silence. The women in the story have not had to discuss their decisions, their reasoning, their rationale. They uncovered evidence, weighed it, and passed a sentence that exonerates Minnie, indicts the men's tradition of justice, and asserts the validity of their own assessments of their power. The women use the men's assumptions, their language, against them, to free one of their own, breaking marriage bonds and social convention.

The point of the story is not what the women know, but how they know it. It is not that the women knew to look in the kitchen and were able to find that misstitched quilt block, the canary with its broken neck, the half-mixed flour, nor is it merely that they can make the logical leap that a half-finished job indicates disruption, that faulty sewing indicates nervousness, and that the dead bird gives a reason for anger and retaliation. What they know is the thing they are referring to when they say “Why do we know—what we know?” Mrs. Hale has exclaimed, “We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand?”

They have brought to bear an identification based on similar experiences with Minnie Foster; the witness they bear is personal, experiential, culturally female. And further, they know that for all the not always exactly good-natured joking the men do about women's place, women's difference, they really don't know the half of it. The men in the story truly believe that a woman is married to the law, that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are essentially bonded to their husbands, and, through their husbands, will owe allegiance to the patriarchal structure of the world. All this is what the women have quietly turned upside down.

Fetterley has pointed out that Glaspell does not keep silent as her characters do, saying that “A Jury of Her Peers” does not suppress, but, rather, tells the woman's story” and suggesting that it “is didactic in the sense that it is designed to educate the male reader in the recognition and interpretation of women's texts.” And it does, to the extent that all readers know what the men in the story do not: that official representatives of patriarchal justice in this text missed the evidence, the criminal, and the cover-up. The men in the story do not know, as the reader does, that there is a secret between the women. Given that the story stops there, though, the point is also that none of us knows where the women will go from here—what they will now do, knowing this secret, and knowing that they know it. At this moment Glaspell's female characters have a kind of power that is perhaps more subversive because it is circumscribed by the silence of women's shared knowledge. Nothing any of them has said is actionable. Nor, significantly, is anything the narrator has said.

The truly subversive nature of this text is not that it records the acts of the women, nor that it reveals their manner of acting without once uttering an incriminating word, but that Glaspell has used language to create the same collusive bond between her narrative and her readers; to the end, Glaspell's narrator has never admitted anything that the characters have not. In merely recording the enactment of this alternative form of justice, she shows a female shared experience that is not articulated, perhaps not articulable. What it is is the full resonance of their question: why do we know what we know?—which is of course in the text most immediately a question about knowing why Minnie has killed her husband. But as the story itself shows, there is a shared female experience of life that goes beyond the facts of spending more time in the kitchen than in the barn and knowing multiple methods of quilting. The shared experience is of living in a culture where those in power “laugh at the insignificance of kitchen things” and the question, “would women know a clue if they saw one?” brings a laugh.

Women reading the story, if they identify with the circumstances of the women's lives in the text, will share as well the insights of the characters about the bonds between women and their lariatlike facility with language and subtext. The story ends with a pun on the words “knot-it,” which is the women's response to the attorney when he says “facetiously, ‘at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?’”

The women intentionally call up the knot of Minnie's noose, which brings unnervingly to mind the image of all those farm women knotting hundreds of knots daily in the fabric of their lives (how many necks could those knots noose?) and is also a pun on “not-it.” To the patronizing of the male legal authorities, to the daily strangulations of husbands, these women's actions shout, as do today's teenagers, “Not!” With this repudiation, they are restitching the faulty fabric of life, as Mrs. Hale explains, “replacing bad sewing with good.”

Notes

1. Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers,” in American Voices, American Women, ed. Lee R. Edwards and Arlyn Diamond, 363. All further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, 1:91.

3. Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading,” 464.

4. Ibid., 463.

5. Lucy, Ethel, Ricky, and Fred were characters in “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy popular in the United States from the early 1950s.

6. See Elaine Hedges, “Small Things Reconsidered.”

7. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 43.

8. Susan S. Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” 618.

9. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life, 42.

10. Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading,” 154.