Susan Glaspell utilizes setting to highlight the cruel circumstances that drive women to retaliate against a male-dominated legal system to administer justice. This story begins on a bitterly cold day, and Mrs. Hale is compelled to rush back inside for her "big woolen scarf" before she can face the biting north wind. This frigid setting reflects the bleak events that have occurred at the Wrights' house.

The weather has been so cold that Minnie's preserves have burst, rendering useless all the hard work she had invested into securing life-sustaining nourishment for herself and her husband. Mrs. Hale, a farmer's wife herself, recognizes the "hard work in the hot weather" that has now been lost and comprehends how devastating this loss will be to Minnie. The demanding, daily work of women is lost on the men, who joke that women are always "worrying over trifles" anyway. The cold weather thus also represents the harsh circumstances, and thankless labor women face.

While the men flippantly dismiss the concerns of women, a cold truth emerges regarding Minnie's life. She has endured years of emotional abuse, socially isolated and without any children to soften her existence. The harsh weather represents Mr. Wright's demeanor, and Mrs. Hale compares him to a "raw wind" as she shivers. It could be said that Minnie herself is like her preserves, which burst in the cold: her home life grew increasingly dreary and harsh to the point that she metaphorically burst when her husband killed her bird.

Symbolically, the dead bird represents Minnie's own life. Mrs. Hale reflects several times that Minnie once loved to sing and had been full of life in her younger years. Mr. Wright extinguishes his wife's beauty and joy through his cold personality, leaving Minnie desperate for hope and companionship.

The bird had offered a glimpse of this much-needed hope, and Minnie had thus cherished it. When Mr. Wright snapped its neck, Minnie's hope was also crushed. The men find it odd that Mr. Wright had been strangled when there was a gun in the house, a much more efficient tool for murder. However, Minnie's decision to strangle her husband as he slept was not coincidental. It reflects her intentional retribution for not only the death of her bird but also the way her own life has been slowly extinguished over twenty years.

If the cold weather represents the harsh and unappreciative world women live in, the team of men investigating the Wright murder is a perfect example of how this world is forged. The attorney kicks Minnie's dirty pans that are stored under the sink, unaware of how much work is required to maintain the kitchen on a working farm. Mr. Hale scoffs at the possibility that the women would even be able to recognize a clue if they stumbled across it.

Ironically, it is the men who remain oblivious to the clues all around them. The women notice the haphazard stitching that reflects Minnie's suddenly frazzled state of mind. They find the empty birdcage and then the dead bird. They recognize the deep loneliness reflected in the details of Minnie's home.

When this story was penned in 1917, women were still forty years away from the possibility of serving on juries. The women, therefore, quietly appoint themselves as a true jury for Minnie, aware that a jury of men could never understand her circumstances. In Minnie's tragedy, they are united by loneliness, personal tragedies, and societal dismissal. They realize that women "all go through the same things" and that there is power in unity.

The men in this story casually belittle the value of women through their ongoing "humorous" banter. Mrs. Hale thus reflects that "men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be," condemning such behavior.

Dismissed by men as being weak and foolish, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters demonstrate women's quiet yet incredible strength, particularly when they unite to support each other. Taking in the totality of Minnie's struggles and empathizing with her emotional desolation, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters pardon Minnie for her crime.

Deception and Loyalty

As Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale reconstruct a likely scenario for Mr. Wright's murder, they find themselves conflicted between deceiving the men, especially Mrs. Peters' husband, the sheriff, and staying loyal to a woman they empathize with. The men's reluctance to consider the quilting, preserves, and the state of the kitchen as important details of the crime leads the women to believe that any attempt to highlight these "trifles" will be met with more dismissive sarcasm. Mrs. Hale encapsulates their dilemma by saying, “The law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove.” Their deceit stems from their loyalty to another woman, even one they barely knew. When the men return to the kitchen after searching the grounds, their minds remain unchanged. In the end, the attorney tells Mrs. Peters, “a sheriff’s wife is married to the law.” She responds, “Not—just that way,” when asked if she agrees.

Public versus Private Life

The men investigating the crime struggle to find a motive for Minnie to kill her husband because they are out of their element. In the early twentieth century, the division between public and private life was stark. Women were confined to the private sphere as homemakers, while men operated in the public world as breadwinners. Women generally lacked knowledge of the male-dominated institutions of law and business, and men were typically unaware of the intricacies of homemaking and child-rearing. The domestic realm of the kitchen is so alien to the sheriff and his male colleagues that they fail to interpret its contents as the women do. To the men, dirty towels and dishes merely indicate poor housekeeping. However, the women understand that most homemakers are diligent and that such disarray may reflect a troubled or disrupted mind. The men's unfamiliarity with women's work leads them to dismiss its significance quickly.

Omniscient Narrator

The third-person omniscient narrator in “A Jury of Her Peers” has the ability to convey the thoughts of all characters. Unlike a first-person narrator, it doesn't limit the story to one character's perspective but instead presents it from a central viewpoint. This type of narration allows readers to observe the physical actions and often the mental and emotional states of multiple characters. It provides insights into things the characters themselves do not verbalize or might be unaware of. For instance, Mrs. Hale’s husband remarks that “women are used to worrying over trifles.” The omniscient narrator notes that he says this with a tone of “good-natured superiority.” While Mr. Hale might not realize he is belittling the women, the narrator highlights this.

However, the narrator primarily focuses on the women in the kitchen. When the men leave to conduct their investigation in the barn and the bedroom upstairs, the narrator does not detail their actions. This might be because whatever the men discover or fail to find is less crucial to the story than what the women uncover. The narrative perspective emphasizes what is most important for the reader to understand, reflecting the author's choice to highlight certain details and events while downplaying others.

Symbolism

Symbolism is a literary device where something represents something beyond its literal meaning while retaining its original significance. Writers use symbolism to add layers of meaning to a character or plot element. In “A Jury of Her Peers,” the canary and the quilt pieces serve as key symbols. The canary represents Minnie, who once sang in the church choir. Mrs. Hale draws this parallel directly: “come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery.” However, the women discover the bird dead, strangled, symbolizing Minnie’s stifled spirit in a dreary home. Just as Mr. Wright had suppressed his wife's freedom, leaving her to work alone in a barren kitchen, he also killed the bird, “a bird that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Both the bird’s song and Minnie’s joy have been extinguished.

The women’s discovery of Minnie’s erratic quilting pattern introduces another intriguing symbolic interpretation. The quilt squares can be seen as a representation of John Wright. Initially, Minnie was diligent with her quilting, ensuring each stitch was precise. However, her recent squares display erratic, messy stitches, indicating her inner turmoil. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters ponder whether Minnie planned to knot or quilt the squares together. When they inform the men that they think she intended to knot the quilt, that knot becomes symbolic of another knot Minnie made—the noose around her husband’s neck. Mrs. Hale’s final comment that Minnie indeed meant to knot the quilt signifies her belief in Minnie’s guilt.

In 1981, "A Jury of Her Peers" was turned into a thirty-minute film with the same name. The movie was directed by Sally Heckel and produced by Texture Films in New York.

Sources

Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Davidson, Cathy, and Linda Wagner-Martin, eds. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 355, 954, 956, 958, 966, 968.

Fetterly, Judith. “Reading About Reading—‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 147–64.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature By Women: The Tradition in English, Norton, 1985, pp. 1,216–1,242, 1,388–1,389.

Hallgren, Sherri. “‘The Law Is the Law—and a Bad Stove is a Bad Stove’: Subversive Justice and Layers of Collusion in ‘A Jury of Her Peers’,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgan, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 203–18.

Makowsky, Veronica. “American Girl Becomes American Woman: A Fortunate Fall?” in Susan Glaspell’s Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 13–28.

O’Brem, Edward, ed. The Best of Short Stories of 1917, Small, Maynard & Co., 1918, pp. 256–82.

Papke, Mary E. Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 15–27.

Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights, 1900–1950, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 36–57.

Stein, Karen F. “The Women’s World of Glaspell’s Trifles,” in Women in American Theatre: Careers, Images, Movements, An Illustrated Sourcebook, Crown, 1981, pp. 251–54.

Further Reading

Makowsky, Veronica. “American Girl Becomes American Woman: A Fortunate Fall?” in Susan Glaspell’s Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work, Oxford University Press, 1993. This essay explores the real trial that inspired “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles, along with the historical context and circumstances surrounding their creation.

Mustazza, Leonard. “Generic Translation and Thematic Shift in Susan Glaspell’s ‘Trifles’ and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall 1989, pp. 489–96. This article argues that in converting Trifles into the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” Glaspell shifted the focus from aspects of women’s lives deemed insignificant by men to the broader issue of women’s disenfranchisement in the American legal system.

Waterman, Arthur. Susan Glaspell, College and University Press, 1966. A detailed biography of the author.