[An American critic and educator, Hedges is the author of Land and Imagination: The Rural Dream in America (1980; with William L Hedges) and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (1980; with Ingrid Wendt).

Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of her Peers" is by now a small feminist classic. Published in 1917, rediscovered in the early 1970s and increasingly reprinted since then in anthologies and textbooks, it has become for both readers and critics a familiar and frequently revisited landmark on our "map of rereading." For Lee Edwards and Arlyn Diamond in 1973 it introduced us to the work of one of the important but forgotten women writers who were then being rediscovered; and its characters, "prairie matrons, bound by poverty and limited experience [who] fight heroic battles on tiny battlefields," provided examples of those ordinary or anonymous women whose voices were also being sought and reclaimed. For Mary Anne Ferguson, also in 1973, Glaspell's story was significant for its challenge to prevailing images or sterotypes of women—women as "fuzzy minded" and concerned only with "trifles," for example—and for its celebration of female sorority, of the power of sisterhood. More recently, in 1980, Annette Kolodny has read the story as exemplary of a female realm of meaning and symbolic signification, a realm ignored by mainstream critics and one, as she urges, that feminist critics must interpret and make available. Rediscovering lost women writers, reclaiming the experience of anonymous women, reexamining the image of women in literature, and rereading texts in order to discern and appreciate female symbol systems—many of the major approaches that have characterized feminist literary criticism in the past decade have thus found generous validation in the text of "A Jury of her Peers." The story has become a paradigmatic one for feminist criticism.

Whatever their different emphases, all of these approaches, when applied to Glaspell's story, have in common their central reliance, for argument and evidence, on that set of small details describing women's daily, domestic lives, which constitutes the story's core. These details—the "clues" through which in the story the two farm women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, solve the mystery of the murder of John Wright—include such minutiae as a soiled roller towel, a broken stove, a cracked jar of preserves, and an erratically stitched quilt block. So central are these details not only to the story's plot but to its larger symbolic meanings, that Glaspell gave them precedence in the title of the dramatic version she originally wrote, the one act play, Trifles, that she produced for the Provincetown Players in 1916. It is by decoding these "trifles," which the men ignore, that the two women not only solve the murder mystery, but develop their sense of identity as women with Minnie Wright, and demonstrate their sisterhood with her by acting to protect her from male law and judgment. It is, therefore, essentially through these trifles that Glaspell creates in her story that female world of meaning and symbol which, as Kolodny says, feminist critics must recover, and make accessible.

My interest here is in extending the story's accessibility, making it more possible for contemporary readers to enter into and respond to the symbolic meanings of the details on which it is so crucially based. Any symbol system, as Jean Kennard for one has shown in her discussion of literary conventions, is a shorthand, a script to which the reader must bring a great deal of knowledge not contained in the text ["Convention Coverage; or, How to Read Your Own Life," New Literary History, 1981]. Critical exegeses of the symbolic worlds of male writers—the forest, the river, the whaling ship—may by now have enabled us imaginatively to enter those worlds. But the same is not yet true for women writers. What is needed, as Kolodny says, is an understanding of the "unique and informing contexts" that underlie the symbol systems of women's writing. Only after these contexts are made accessible are we likely to be able to enjoy that "fund of shared recognitions" upon which, as Kolodny also notes, any viable symbol system depends ["A Map for Rereading; or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts," New Literary History, 1980].

In Glaspell's story, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters comprise an ideal (if small) community of readers precisely because they are able to bring to the "trivia" of Minnie Wright's life just such a "unique and informing context." That context is their own experience as midwestern rural women. As a result they can read Minnie's kitchen trifles with full "recognition and acceptance of … their significance." For contemporary readers, however, who are historically removed from the way of life on which Glaspell's story depends, such a reading is not so readily available. Superficially we can of course comprehend the story's details, since women's work of cooking, cleaning, and sewing is scarcely strange, or unfamiliar, either to female or to male readers. But to appreciate the full resonance of those details requires by now an act of historical reconstruction. Glaspell's details work so effectively as a symbol system because they are carefully chosen reflectors of crucial realities in the lives of 19th and early 20th century midwestern and western women. The themes, the broader meanings of "A Jury of her Peers," which are what encourage us to rediscover and reread it today, of course extend beyond its regional and historical origins. Women's role or "place" in society, their confinement and isolation, the psychic violence wrought against them, their power or powerlessness vis-a-vis men, are not concerns restricted to Glaspell's time and place. But these concerns achieve their imaginative force and conviction in her story by being firmly rooted in, and organically emerging from, the carefully observed, small details of a localized way of life.

I would therefore like to reenter Glaspell's text by returning it to that localized, past way of life. Such reentry is possible by now, given the recent work of social historians in western women's history. The past six to seven years, especially, have seen the publication of works on the lives of western women by such historians as John Faragher, Julie Jeffrey, Norton Juster, Sandra Myres, Glenda Riley, and Christine Stansell. And the same years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's writings in non-traditional forms—the diaries, letters, journals, and autobiographies of 19th and early 20th century pioneer and farm women, women less silenced than Minnie Wright in Glaspell's story—on which, indeed, much of the published social history depends. It is this body of material, as well as my own researches into the autobiographical writings of 19th century women, on which I shall draw in order to recreate, however imperfectly, some of the historical reality that informs the responses of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to Minnie Wright's life. Again and again in "A Jury of her Peers" Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters perform acts of perception in which a literal object opens out for them into a larger world of meaning. At one point in the story Glaspell describes these acts as a way of "seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else." To uncover that "something else"—the dense, hidden background reality of rural women's lives—may enable us to participate more fully in those acts of perception and thus to appreciate Glaspell's achievement—the way in which, by concentrating on a small, carefully selected set of literal details, she communicates, in one very brief short story, an extraordinarily rich, multilayered sense of women's sociocultural "place" in late 19th and early 20th century American society.

By the time she published "A Jury of her Peers" in 1917, Susan Glaspell had been living in the east for several years, both in Greenwich Village and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But she had been born and raised in Iowa, and her earliest fiction had dealt with the people of her native midwest, and especially with the confined lives, whether on the isolated farm or in the midwestern small town or village, of women. In writing her play, Trifles, and then her story, therefore, she was returning to her midwestern origins, and to the lives of women of her mother's and grandmother's generations.

"A Jury of her Peers" is set in the prairie and plains region of the United States. The story itself contains a reference to the county attorney's having just returned from Omaha, which would literally locate the action in Nebraska. And a further reference to "Dickson County," as the place where the characters live, might suggest Dixon County, an actual county in the northeastern corner of Nebraska where it borders on Iowa. In the narrowest sense, then, given Glaspell's own Iowa origins, the story can be said to refer to the prairie and plains country that stretches across Iowa into Nebraska—a country of open, level or rolling land, and few trees, which generations of pioneers encountered during successive waves of settlement throughout the nineteenth century. More broadly, the story reflects the lives of women across the entire span of prairie and plains country, and some of the circumstances of Minnie Wright's life were shared by women further west as well. While emphasizing Iowa and Nebraska, therefore, this paper will draw for evidence on the autobiographical writings by women from various western states.

Glaspell's references to the outdoor setting are few. As the story opens she emphasizes the cold wintry day, and the emptiness of the terrain through which the characters travel on their way to the Wright homestead, where they are going to investigate the murder. But the very sparseness of her detail serves to suggest the spare, empty lives of her characters, and especially of Minnie Wright's. What Mrs. Hale notes as the group approaches the Wright farm is the "loneliness" both of the farmhouse and its surroundings. Three times in as many sentences she uses the words "lonely" or "lonesome" to describe the locale. (The road is lonely, and the farm, "down in a hollow," is surrounded by "lonesome looking poplar trees.") Kolodny has suggested that this sensitivity to place distinguishes the women in the story from the men, who confine their talk to the crime that was committed the day before. Whether or not one can generalize from this difference (as Kolodny does) to conclusions about gender-linked perceptions, it does seem to be the case that 19th century pioneer women were more strongly affected than men by a sense of the loneliness of the landscape they encountered in the west.

In spring, when the wild flowers were in bloom, the western prairie might seem "a perfect garden of Eden," as it did to an Iowa woman in 1851. But frequently the women's voices that we hear from that pioneer past express dismay at what they saw when they arrived. A prairie burned by the autumn fires that regularly ravaged the land might understandably seem "black and dismal," as the Illinois prairie did to Christiana Tillson in 1822. Other women, however, even when viewing a less seared and searing landscape, found the prairie unsettling especially as they moved farther west. "What solitude!," exclaimed the Swedish visitor, Fredrika Bremer, arriving in Wisconsin in the 1850s. "I saw no habitation, except the little house at which I was staying; no human beings, no animals; nothing except heaven and the flower-strewn earth." And Mrs. Cecil Hall, visiting northern territories in 1882 wrote, "O the prairie! I cannot describe to you our first impression. Its vastness, dreariness, and loneliness is [sic] appalling."

When a male pioneer registered his sense of the land's emptiness, it was often to recognize that the emptiness bore more heavily upon women. Seth K. Humphrey wrote of his father's and his own experiences, in Minnesota territory in the 1850s and in the middle northwest in the 1870s, and he remembered that "the prairie has a solitude way beyond the mere absence of human beings." With no trees, no objects to engage or interrupt the glance, the eyes "stare, stare—and sometimes the prairie gets to staring back." Women, he observed, especially suffered. They "fled in terror," or "stayed until the prairie broke them." Women themselves reported that it was not unusual to spend five months in a log cabin without seeing another woman, as did a Marshall County, Iowa woman in 1842; or to spend one and a half years after arriving before being able to take a trip to town, as did Luna Kellie in Nebraska in the 1870s. The absence both of human contact and of any ameliorating features in the landscape exacerbated the loneliness felt by women who had often only reluctantly uprooted themselves from eastern homes and families in order to follow their husbands westward.

Minnie Wright is not of course living in circumstances of such extreme geographical isolation. By the time of Glaspell's story, established villages and towns have replaced the first scattered settlements, and networks of transportation and communication link people previously isolated from one another. But John Wright's farm, as we learn, is an isolated, outlying farm, separated from the town of which it is, formally, a part. Furthermore, he refuses to have a telephone; and, as we also learn, he has denied his wife access to even the minimal contacts that town life might afford women at that time, such as the church choir in which Minnie had sung before her marriage. Minnie Wright's emotional and spiritual loneliness, the result of her isolation, is, in the final analysis, the reason for her murder of her husband. Through her brief opening description of the landscape Glaspell establishes the physical context for the loneliness and isolation, an isolation Minnie inherited from and shared with generations of pioneer and farm women before her.

The full import of Minnie's isolation emerges only incrementally in Glaspell's story. Meanwhile, after the characters arrive at the Wright farm, the story confines itself to the narrow space of Minnie's kitchen—the limited and limiting space of her female sphere. Within that small space are revealed all the dimensions of the loneliness that is her mute message. And that message is of course conveyed through those "kitchen things," as the sheriff dismissingly calls them, to which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters respond with increasing comprehension and sympathy.

One of the first "kitchen things" or "trifles" to which Glaspell introduces us is the roller towel, on which the attorney condescendingly comments. Not considering, as the women do, that his own assistant, called in earlier that morning to make up a fire in Minnie's absence, had probably dirtied the towel, he decides that the soiled towel shows that Minnie lacked "the homemaking instinct." The recent researches of historians into the lives of 19th century women allow us today to appreciate the full ironic force of Mrs. Hale's quietly understated reply: "There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm." One of the most important contributions of the new social history is its documentation of the amount of work that pioneer and farm women did. The work was, as one historian has said, "almost endless," and over the course of a lifetime usually consisted of tasks "more arduous and demanding than those performed by men." Indoors and out, the division of labour "favored men" and "exploited women." Sarah Brewer-Bonebright, recalling her life in Newcastle, Iowa in 1848, described the "routine" work of the "womenfolk" as including "water carrying, cooking, churning, sausage making, berry picking, vegetable drying, sugar and soap boiling, hominy hulling, medicine brewing, washing, nursing, weaving, sewing, straw platting, wool picking, spinning, quilting, knitting, gardening and various other tasks.…" Workdays that began at 4.30 a. m., and didn't end until 11.30 p. m., were not unheard of. Jessamyn West's description of her Indiana grandmother—"She died saying, 'Hurry, hurry, hurry,' not to a nurse, not to anyone at her bedside, but to herself "—captures an essential reality of the lives of many 19th and early 20th century rural women.

The work involved for Minnie Wright in preparing the clean towel that the attorney takes for granted is a case in point. Of all the tasks that 19th and early 20th century women commented on in their diaries, laundry was consistently described as the most onerous.

Friday May 27 This is the dreaded washing day

Friday June 23 To day Oh! horrors how shall I express it; is the dreaded washing day.

This entry from an 1853 diary is typical of what are often litanies of pain, ritualistically repeated in the records that 19th century women have left us of their lives. In her recent study of housework, Never Done, Susan Strasser agrees that laundry was woman's "most hated task." Before the introduction of piped water it took staggering amounts of time and labor: "One wash, one boiling, and one rinse used about fifty gallons of water—or four hundred pounds—which had to be moved from pump or well or faucet to stove and tub, in buckets and wash boilers that might weigh as much as forty or fifty pounds." Then came rubbing, wringing, and lifting the wet clothing and linens, and carrying them in heavy tubs and baskets outside to hang. It is when Mrs. Peters looks from Minnie's inadequate stove, with its cracked lining, to the "pail of water carried in from outside" that she makes the crucial observation about "seeing into things … seeing through a thing to something else." What the women see, beyond the pail and the stove, are the hours of work it took Minnie to produce that one clean towel. To call Minnie's work "instinctual," as the attorney does (using a rationalization prevalent today as in the past) is to evade a whole world of domestic reality, a world of which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are acutely aware.

So too with the jars of preserves that the women find cracked and spoiled from the cold that has penetrated the house during the night. It is the preserves, about which Minnie has been worrying in jail, that lead Mr. Hale to make the comment Glaspell used for the title of the dramatic version of her work. "Held for murder, and worrying over her preserves… worrying over trifles." But here again, as they express their sympathy with Minnie's concern, the women are seeing through a thing to something else: in this case, to "all [Minnie's] work in the hot weather," as Mrs. Peters exclaims. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters understand the physical labor involved in boiling fruit in Iowa heat that one historian has described as "oppressive and inescapable." By the same token, they can appreciate the seriousness of the loss when that work is destroyed by the winter cold.

The winter cold is, as has been said, one of the few references to outdoor setting that Glaspell includes in her story. When at the beginning of the story Mrs. Hale closes her storm door behind her to accompany the others to the Wright farm, it is a "cold March morning," with a north wind blowing. Later we are told that the temperature had fallen below zero the night before. Historians have described the prairie and plains winters, their interminable length, the ceaseless winds that whipped across the treeless spaces, the "infamous" blizzards peculiar to the region—storms not of snow but of ice particles that penetrated clothes and froze the eyes shut. Eliza Farnham, travelling through the prairie in 1846, described the cold in the uninsulated log cabins and frame houses: "the cups freeze to the saucers while [the family] are at table." And Mary Abell, living in Kansas in 1875, related how "my eyelids froze together so I picked off the ice, the tops of the sheets and quilts and all our beds were frozen stiff with the breath. The cold was so intense we could not breathe the air without pain." Such weather demanded heroic maintenance efforts to keep a family warm, and fed. Engaged as they were in just such maintenance efforts (at the beginning of the story Mrs. Hale is reluctant to leave her kitchen because her own work is unfinished) the women can appreciate the meaning of the loss of Minnie's laboriously prepared food.

Hard as the work was, that it went unacknowledged was often harder for women to bear. The first annual report of the Department of Agriculture in 1862 included a study of the situation of farm women which concluded that they worked harder than men but were neither treated with respect as a result nor given full authority within their domestic sphere. And Norton Juster's study of farm women between 1865 and 1895 [So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895, 1979] leads him to assert that women's work was seen merely as "the anonymous background for someone else's meaningful activity," never attaining "a recognition or dignity of its own." Indeed, he concludes, women's work was not only ignored; it was ridiculed, "often the object of derision." Mr. Hale's remark about the preserves, that "women are used to worrying over trifles," is a mild example of this ridicule, as is the attorney's comment, intended to deflect that ridicule but itself patronizing—"yet what would we do without the ladies." It is this ridicule to which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters especially react. When Mr. Hale belittles women's work we are told that "the two women moved a little closer together"; and when the attorney makes his seemingly conciliatory remark the women, we are further told, "did not speak, did not unbend." Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, who at the beginning of the story are comparative strangers to each other, here begin to establish their common bonds with each other and with Minnie. Their slight physical movement towards each other visually embodies that psychological and emotional separation from men that was encouraged by the nineteenth century doctrine of separate spheres, a separation underscored throughout the story by the women's confinement to the kitchen, while the men range freely, upstairs and outside, bedroom to barn, in search of the "real" clues to the crime.

Women's confinement to the kitchen or to the private space of the home was a major source of their isolation. Men didn't appreciate how "their own toil is sweetened to them by the fact that it is out of doors," said one farm woman; and Juster has concluded that the lives of farm women in the second half of the 19th century were lives "tied to house and children, lacking opportunity for outside contacts, stimulation, or variety of experience." In Glaspell's story, Mrs. Hale moves only from one kitchen to another. That she hasn't visited Minnie, whom she has known since girlhood, in over a year she guiltily attributes to her antipathy to the cheerlessness of the Wright farm. But there is truth in Mrs. Peters' attempt to assuage that guilt: "But of course you were awful busy … your house—and your children."

"A walking visit to neighbors was not a casual affair but could take an entire morning or afternoon," says [John Mack Faragher] in describing the settlement on separate farmsteads, often far distant from each other, and like Juster he concludes that "the single most important distinction between the social and cultural worlds of men and women was the isolation and immobility of wives compared to husbands" [Women and Men on the Overland Trail, 1979]. "Grandma Brown," whose one hundred year life span from 1827 to 1927 is recorded in her autobiography, lived on an Iowa farm for fourteen years, from 1856 to 1870. They were, she said, "the hardest years of my life. The drudgery was unending. The isolation was worse." Both during the frontier stage and in later periods of village settlement men routinely enjoyed more opportunities for social life than women. They travelled to town with their farm produce, to have their grain and corn milled, to trade surpluses, to have wool carded or skins tanned. In "A Jury of her Peers" John Wright's murder is discovered because Mr. Hale and his son stop at the Wright farm while travelling to town with their potato crop. Once in town, men had places to congregate—the market, the country store, the blacksmith shop, the saloon. That "women really did little more than pass through the masculine haunts of the village," as Faragher concludes, was a reality to which at least one 19th century male writer was sensitive. "The saloon-keepers, the politicians, and the grocers make it pleasant for the man," Hamlin Garland has a character comment in his story of midwestern rural life, "A Day's Pleasure"; "But the wife is left without a word." Garland wrote "A Day's Pleasure" to dramatize the plight of the farm wife, isolated at home, and desperate for diversion. Mrs. Markham has been six months without leaving the family farm. But when, over her husband's objections and by dint of sacrificed sleep and extra work to provide for her children while she is gone, she manages to get into town, she finds scant welcome, and little to do. After overstaying her leave at the country store, she walks the streets for hours, in the "forlorn, aimless, pathetic wandering" that, Garland has the town grocer observe, is "a daily occurrence for the farm women he sees and one which had never possessed any special meaning to him."

John Wright's insensitivity to his wife's needs parallels that of the men of Garland's story. Lacking decent clothes, Minnie doesn't travel into town. What she turns to in her isolation is a bird, a canary bought from a travelling peddler. It is after her husband strangles that surrogate voice that, in one of those "intermittent flare-ups of bizarre behavior," as one historian has described them, which afflicted rural women, she strangles him [Jeannie McKnight, "American Dream, Nightmare Underside: Diaries, Letters, and Fiction of Women on the American Frontier," in Women, Women Writers, and the West, edited by L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis].

Here again Glaspell's story reflects a larger truth about the lives of rural women. Their isolation induced madness in many. The rate of insanity in rural areas, especially for women, was a much-discussed subject in the second half of the 19th century. As early as 1868 Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the influential Godey's Lady's Book, expressed her concern that the farm population supplied the largest proportion of inmates for the nation's insane asylums. By the 1880s and 1890s this concern was widespread. An article in 1882 noted that farmer's wives comprised the largest percentage of those in lunatic asylums. And a decade later The Atlantic Monthly was reporting "the alarming rate of insanity … in the new prairie States among farmers and their wives." Abigail McCarthy recalled in her autobiography stories she had heard as a girl in the 1930s about the first homesteaders in North Dakota, two generations earlier. Women could be heard, she wrote

screaming all night long in the jail after the first spring thaw. Their husbands had brought them into town in wagons from the sod huts where they had spent the terrible Dakota winter; they were on their way to the insane asylum in Jamestown.

That the loss of her music, in the shape of a bird, should have triggered murderous behavior in Minnie Wright is therefore neither gratuitous nor melodramatic, as is sometimes charged against Glaspell's story. In the monotonous expanses of the prairie and the plains, the presence of one small spot of color, or a bit of music, might spell the difference between sanity and madness. Mari Sandoz, chronicler of the lives of Nebraska pioneers, describes in her short story "The Vine" a woman so desperate for some color in the brown, treeless expanse of the prairie that she uses precious water—scarce during a drought—to keep alive a trumpet vine outside the door of her sod house. When her husband, enraged at her wastefulness, uproots and kills the vine, she goes mad. In Old Jules, her account of the life of her homesteading father, Sandoz relates the true story of a farm wife who suddenly one afternoon killed herself and her three children. At her funeral a woman neighbor comments, "If she would a had even a geranium—but in that cold shell of a shack—." Again and again in their recollections of their lives on the prairie and plains, women described the importance of a bit of color, or music. The music might come, as it did for Minnie Wright, from a canary in a cage. Late 19th century photographs of families outside their Dakota and Nebraska sod huts routinely show the bird cage hung to one side of the front door. Indoors, it was likely to be one of the deep windows carved into the thick sod walls that provided the "spot of beauty" so necessary to psychological survival. As late as 1957 the Nebraska Farmer published interviews it had secured with women who had experienced the conditions of pioneer settlement. The comment of Mrs. Orval Lookhart is typical of many the journal received. She remembered the special window in the prairie sod house that was invariably reserved for "flowers and plants … a place where the wife and mother could have one spot of beauty that the wind the cold or the dry weather couldnet (sic) touch." There is no spot of beauty in Glaspell's description of Minnie's kitchen, which is presented as a drab and dreary space, dominated by the broken stove, and a rocking chair of "a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side." When the women collect some of Minnie's clothes to take to her in prison, the sight of "a shabby black skirt" painfully reminds Mrs. Hale by contrast of the "pretty clothes" that Minnie wore as a young girl before her marriage.

Unable to sing in the church choir, deprived of her surrogate voice in the bird, denied access to other people, and with no visible beauty in her surroundings, Minnie, almost inevitably one can say, turned in her loneliness to that final resource available to 19th and early 20th century women—quilting. Minnie's quilt blocks are the penultimate trifle in Glaspell's story. The discovery later of the strangled bird and broken bird cage explain the immediate provocation for Minnie's crime. But it is with the discovery of the quilt blocks, to which the women react more strongly than they have to any of the previously introduced "kitchen things," that a pivotal point in the story is reached.

The meaning of quilts in the lives of American women is complex, and Glaspell's story is a valuable contribution to the full account that remains to be written. Quilts were utilitarian in origin, three-layered bed coverings intended to protect against the cold weather. But they became in the course of the 19th century probably the major creative outlet for women—one patriarchically tolerated, and even "approved," for their use, but which women were able to transform to their own ends. Through quilting—through their stitches as well as through pattern and color—and through the institutions, such as the "bee," that grew up around it, women who were otherwise without expressive outlet were able to communicate their thoughts and feelings.

In Trifles Glaspell included a reference she omitted from "A Jury of her Peers," but which is worth retrieving. In the play Mrs. Hale laments that, given her husband's parsimony, Minnie could never join the Ladies Aid. The Ladies Aid would have been a female society associated with the local church, where women would have spent their time sewing, braiding carpets, and quilting, in order to raise money for foreign missionaries, for new flooring or carpets, chairs or curtains for the church or parish house, or to add to the minister's salary. Such societies, as Glenda Riley has observed [in Frontiers Women: The Iowa Experience, 1981], provided women with "a relief from the routine and monotony" of farm life. They also provided women with a public role, or place. And through the female friendships they fostered they helped women, as Julie Jeffrey has noted [in Frontier Women: The TransMississippi West 1840-1880, 1979], to develop "feelings of control over their environment," mitigating that sense of powerlessness which domestic isolation could induce.

Denied such associations, Minnie Wright worked on her quilt blocks alone, and it is the effect of that solitude which the women read in her blocks and which so profoundly moves them. It is, specifically, the stitches in Minnie's blocks that speak to them, and particularly the "queer" stitches in one block, so unlike the "fine, even sewing," "dainty [and] accurate," that they observe in the others. Nineteenth century women learned in childhood to take stitches so small that in the words of one woman, it "required a microscope to detect them" [Clarissa Packard, Recollections of a Housekeeper, 1834]. Mothers were advised to teach their daughters to make small, exact stitches, not only for durability but as a way of instilling habits of patience, neatness, and diligence. But such stitches also became a badge of one's needlework skill, a source of selfesteem, and of status, through the recognition and admiration of other women. Minnie's "crazy" or crooked stitches are a clear signal to the two women that something, for her, was very seriously wrong.

Mrs. Hale's reaction is immediate. Tampering with what is in fact evidence—for the badly stitched block is just such a clue as the men are seeking: "Something to show anger—or sudden feeling"—she replaces Minnie's crooked stitches with her own straight ones. The almost automatic act, so protective of Minnie, is both concealing and healing. To "replace bad sewing with good" is Mrs. Hale's symbolic gesture of affiliation with the damaged woman. It is also the story's first intimation of the more radical tampering with the evidence that the two women will later undertake.

In so quickly grasping the significance of Minnie's quilt stitches, Mrs. Hale is performing yet another of those acts of perception—of seeing through a detail or trifle to its larger meaning—on which Glaspell's dramatic effects depend throughout her story. As she holds the badly stitched block in her hand, Mrs. Hale, we are told, "feels queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her." Resorting to needlework in order to "quiet oneself," to relieve distress, or alleviate loneliness, was openly recognized and even encouraged throughout the 19th century, especially in the advice books that proliferated for women. One of the earliest and most popular of these was John Gregory's A Father's Advice to his Daughters, published in 1774 in England and widely read both there and in the United States well into the 19th century. Gregory recommended needlework to his female readers "to enable you to fill up, in a tolerably agreeable way, some of the many solitary hours you must necessarily pass at home." By 1831, as advice manuals began to be produced in this country, Lydia Child in The Mother's Book urged mothers to teach their daughters needlework, such as knitting, as a way of dealing with the "depression of spirits" they would inevitably experience in later life. "Women," Child wrote, "in all situations in life, have so many lonely hours, that they cannot provide themselves with too many resources.…"And as late as 1885 popular writer Jane Croly introduced a book of needlework instructions with a parable, in which an angel, foreseeing the "abuse" that woman would suffer from men, urged God not to create her. God refused. However, out of pity woman was given "two compensating gifts." These were "tears, and the love of needlework." Although one woman who read Croly's book tartly rejoined, in a letter to The Housekeeper, a magazine for women, that she would prefer to keep the tears and give men the needlework, for numbers of others needlework served, in Croly's words, as "that solace in sorrow—that helper in misfortune." That it might have so served Minnie Wright Mrs. Hale can immediately appreciate.

Minnie's stitches speak with equal directness to Mrs. Peters. It is she who first discovers the badly stitched block, and as she holds it out to Mrs. Hale we are told that "the women's eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them." In contrast to the often outspoken Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters has been timid, self-effacing, and "indecisive," torn between sympathy for Minnie and resigned submission to the authority of the law, which her husband, the sheriff, represents. She has evaded Mrs. Hale's efforts to get her more openly to choose sides. The flash of recognition between the two women, a moment of communication the more intense for being wordless, is, as one critic has said, "the metamorphizing spark of the story" [Kathy Newman, "Susan Glaspell and 'Trifles': 'Nothing Here but Kitchen Things,'" Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, Fall 1983]. It presages Mrs. Peter's eventual revolt against male authority. That revolt occurs when she snatches the box containing the dead bird—the evidence that could condemn Minnie—in order to conceal it from the men. Her defiant act is of course the result of the effect on her of the accumulated weight of meaning of all of the "trifles" she has perceived and interpreted throughout the story. But it is here, when she reads Minnie's stitches, that she is first released from her hesitancy into what will later become full conspiratorial complicity with Mrs. Hale.

In examining Minnie's quilt blocks Mrs. Hale observes that she was making them in the "log cabin pattern." The log cabin pattern was one of the most popular in the second half of the 19th century, frequently chosen for its capacity to utilize in its construction small scraps of left-over fabric. For Minnie in her poverty it would have been a practical pattern choice. But there accrued to the pattern a rich symbolism, which would not have escaped a farm woman like Mrs. Hale and which adds yet another rich layer of meaning to Glaspell's exploration of women's place. The log cabin quilt is constructed of repetitions of a basic block, which is built up of narrow overlapping strips of fabric, all emanating from a central square. That square, traditionally done in red cloth, came to represent the hearth fire within the cabin, with the strips surrounding it becoming the "logs" of which the cabin was built. As a replication of that most emotionally evocative of American dwelling types, the log cabin quilt came to symbolize both the hardships and the heroisms of pioneer life. More specifically it became a celebration of women's civilizing role in the pioneering process: in the words of one researcher, "women's dogged determination to build a home, to replace a wilderness with a community" [Suellen Jackson-Meyer, "The Great American Quilt Classics: Log Cabin," Quilters'Newsletter, October 1979].

The 19th century ideology of domesticity defined woman's sphere as that of the home, but within that home it gave her, in theory, a queenly role, as guardian and purveyor of the essential moral and cultural values of the society. That role was frequently symbolized, especially in the popular domestic fiction of the 19th century, by the hearth fire, over which the woman presided, ministering, in the light of its warm glow, to the physical and emotional needs of her family. Julie Jeffrey has demonstrated the willingness and even determination with which women resumed this domestic role upon their arrival in the transMississippi west after the dislocations induced by the overland journey, their sense of themselves as the culture bearers and civilizers. And in her recent The Lay of the Land: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 Annette Kolodny shows that on the earlier Mississippi Valley frontier (and in Texas as well) women's dreams were above all domestic—to create a home as a paradise.

That Minnie is making a log cabin quilt—and the women find a roll of red cloth in her sewing basket—is, both in this historical context and in the context of her own life, both poignant and bitterly ironic. The center of her kitchen is not a hearth with an inviting open fire but that stove with its broken lining, the sight of which, earlier in the story, had "swept [Mrs. Hale] into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with." In Glaspell's story the cult of domesticity has become a trap, Minnie's home has become her prison. Minnie has asked Mrs. Peters to bring her an apron to wear in jail, a request the sheriff's wife at first finds "strange." But when Mrs. Peters decides that wearing the apron will perhaps make Minnie feel "more natural," we can only agree, since in moving from house to jail she has but exchanged one form of imprisonment for another.

In 1917 when Glaspell rewrote and retitled Trifles, feminists were engaged in their final years of effort to free women from at least one of the "imprisonments" to which they had been historically subject—the lack of the vote. Her change of title emphasized the story's contemporaneity, by calling attention to its references to the issue of woman's legal place in American society. The denouement depends on that issue. It is immediately after the county attorney, patronizing as always, expresses his confidence that in carrying things to Minnie in jail Mrs. Peters will take nothing suspicious because she is "married to the law," that she proceeds to divorce herself from that law by abetting Mrs. Hale in concealing the dead bird. With that act the two women radically subvert the male legal system within which they have no viable place. Throughout much of the 19th century married women were defined under the law as "civilly dead," their legal existence subsumed within their husbands, their rights to their own property, wages, and children either non-existent or severely circumscribed. Nor did they participate in the making and administering of the law. In 1873 Susan B. Anthony had challenged that legal situation, in a defense that was widely reprinted and that would have been available to Glaspell at the time of the final agitation for the vote. Arrested for having herself tried to vote, and judged guilty of having thereby committed a crime, Anthony had argued that the all-male jury which judged her did not comprise, as the Constitution guaranteed to each citizen, a "jury of her peers." So long, she argued, as women lacked the vote and other legal rights, men were not their peers but their superiors. So, in Glaspell's story, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters decide that they, and not the men, are Minnie's true peers. They take the law into their own hands, appoint themselves prosecuting and defense attorneys, judge and jury, and pass their merciful sentence.

In committing her "crime," Mrs. Peters resorts not to any constitutional justification but to a bit of sophistry cunningly based on the trivia which are the heart of Glaspell's story. Why reveal the dead bird to the men, she reasons, when they consider all of women's concerns insignificant? If the men could hear us, she suggests to Mrs. Hale, "getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary … My, wouldn't they laugh?" But it is the women who have the last laugh (in a story in which potential tragedy has been transformed into comedy), and that laugh hinges upon a very "little thing" indeed. Glaspell gives literally the last word to one of the story's seemingly least significant details. As the characters prepare to leave the Wright farm, the county attorney facetiously asks the women whether Minnie was going to "quilt" or "knot" her blocks. In having Mrs. Hale suggest that she was probably going to knot them (that is, join the quilt layers via short lengths of yarn drawn through from the back and tied or knotted at wide intervals across the top surface, rather than stitch through the layers at closer intervals with needle and thread) Glaspell is using a technical term from the world of women's work in a way that provides a final triumphant vindication of her method throughout the story. If, like Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the reader can by now engage in those acts of perception whereby one sees "into things, [and] through a thing to something else," the humble task of knotting a quilt becomes resonant with meaning. Minnie has knotted a rope around her husband's neck, and Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have "tied the men in knots." All three women have thus said "not," or "no" to male authority, and in so doing they have knotted or bonded themselves together. Knots can entangle and they can unite, and at the end of Glaspell's story both men and women are knotted, in separate and different ways, with the women having discovered through their interpretation of the trifles that comprise Minnie's world their ties to one another. One 19th century woman described quilts as women's "hieroglyphics"—textile documents on which, with needle, thread, and bits of colored cloth, women inscribed a record of their lives. All of the trifles in Glaspell's story together create such a set of hieroglyphics, but it is a language we should by now begin to be able to read.

Elaine Hedges, "Small Things Reconsidered: Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury of Her Peers," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1986, pp. 89-110.