Student Question

What do you predict will happen to Mrs. Wright? Can her guilt be proven?

Quick answer:

No, because the only evidence is the dead bird and the only people who understand how this is significant are the women and the play makes clear that they conceal it anyway (even if the men saw its significance). To the men, Mrs. Wright had no motive.

Expert Answers

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No, because the only evidence is the dead bird, and the only people who understand how this is significant are the women (the sheriff's wife among them), and the play makes clear that they conceal the bird anyway, even if the men saw its significance.  To the men, Mrs. Wright had no motive.  This play is not a murder mystery to be solved, but a subtle feminist statement (well before Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and the 80's), dramatizing the age-old blind spot that men have toward women's need for freedom.  The cage represents the social prison these women feel around them, and the dead bird is a victim of the husband's selfishness and rage at any singing or joy in his house.  Susan Glaspell, a contemporary of Eugene O'Neill's, enjoyed a belated popularity after the Feminist Revolution of the late 20th century, after several paperback anthologies of women playwrights were published, giving the classroom access to these otherwise lost plays.  Mrs. Wright is in no danger of ever being considered strong-willed enough to open her own cage.

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