A Jury of Her Peers

The short story “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell describes the investigation of a mysterious murder in rural Dickson County. Glaspell explores gender roles in the early 20th century, the effects of isolation on people’s emotional and mental states, and the duty of neighbors to help one another. Additionally, Glaspell comments directly on the sexism of this period in American history and the prejudices inherent in the belief that women’s proper and only place is in the kitchen. This short story is an adaptation of Glaspell’s original play, Trifles (1916).

Mrs. Martha Hale rushes back into her kitchen to grab her scarf because the day is cold and windy. She looks around at the disarray; she doesn’t like leaving her kitchen with things half done. Her husband calls out for her to hurry and she rushes to join the others in the buggy: Sheriff Peters and his wife; the county attorney, a young man named George Henderson; and her husband, Lewis Hale. They are needed to help with the investigation of John Wright’s murder. Yesterday, her husband stopped by the Wrights’ house and discovered Mrs. Wright acting oddly and Mr. Wright strangled, upstairs in his bed.

The five adults arrive at the Wright homestead, which looks lonesome sitting by itself in a hollow. They enter the house; the men stand by the fire, talking, while the women hang back, looking around the kitchen.

The sheriff questions Mr. Hale, asking him if the room looks the same as when he arrived yesterday and then prompting him to tell them what happened. Mr. Hale reports that the room looks exactly the same as yesterday. He looks ill when he begins recounting the events of the previous morning. Mrs. Hale worries that her husband will ramble while telling the story, revealing things that will make things more difficult for Minnie Foster.

Yesterday morning, Mr. Hale and his son, Harry, were carrying a load of potatoes to town. As they passed the Wrights’ house, Mr. Hale decided to stop in and ask John Wright if he would get a telephone. The Hales want a telephone, but they need a neighbor to get one too to make it worthwhile for the telephone company to take the line down their remote rural road. Mr. Hale rambles a bit and reveals that John Wright didn’t like to talk much, didn’t approve of telephones because he thought that people talked too much already, and that he didn’t much care what his wife, Minnie, wanted, including whether or not she wanted a telephone.

Mr. Hale reports that Minnie Wright said that he couldn’t speak to John because he was dead, lying upstairs strangled by a rope. He called his son Harry inside, and they went upstairs and found John Wright dead, just as Minnie had described.

They come back downstairs, and Harry asks Mrs. Wright who did it. Mrs. Wright reports that she doesn’t know because she didn’t wake up. She sleeps soundly and on the side of the bed furthest from the door. Then Harry Hale goes for help, while Mr. Hale waits with Mrs. Wright for the sheriff and the coroner to arrive.

Mr. Hale makes small talk with Minnie, saying he had come that morning to ask John if he wanted to put in a telephone. At this, Minnie started to laugh, but stopped herself, looking scared. Soon the coroner and the sheriff arrive.

The county attorney decides that the men will go upstairs next and then take a look around outside the house and in the barn. He looks around the kitchen, and the men all agree that there is nothing of significance there; the sheriff concurs stating that there’s “‘nothing here but kitchen things’” (148).

The county attorney is drawn to an ugly kitchen cupboard and opens the top to find it full of Mrs. Wright’s fruit preserve jars, all broken. He seems to consider the mess to be Mrs. Wright’s fault, and Mrs. Peters steps in to say that Mrs. Wright worried that if the fire went out during the night that the cold in the kitchen would burst her preserve jars, which is what must have happened. Mr. Peters laughs at the odd priorities of women: Mrs. Wright is being held for murder, yet she worries about her fruit jars. Mr. Hale concurs, saying that women are used to worrying over such “trifles” (148).

The county attorney washes his hands and criticizes the dirtiness of the towel. He also kicks some dirty pans on the floor and comments that Mrs. Wright isn’t much of a housekeeper. Mrs. Hale comes to Mrs. Wright’s defense, saying that there is a lot of work on a farm and that towels get dirty quickly when men use them with dirty hands. The county attorney laughs at her for defending Mrs. Wright out of loyalty to her sex. Mrs. Hale admits that she wasn’t friends with Mrs. Wright and hadn’t seen her in over a year, because the Wrights’ house “never seemed a very cheerful place” (149).

The men leave the women alone in the kitchen while they go on with their investigation. The county attorney gives the women permission to gather the things that Mrs. Wright has asked to be brought to her while she’s in jail. While looking at Mrs. Hale, the county attorney asks Mrs. Peters to let him know if they find anything that would help the investigation, particularly any “‘clue to the motive’” (150) for Minnie to kill her husband. Mr. Hale makes a joke as he leaves, implying that the women wouldn’t know a clue if they found one.

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters start talking. Mrs. Hale says that she would resent men coming into her kitchen criticizing and “’snoopin’ around’” (150). She continues, saying that no one should judge Minnie’s kitchen when she had to come away in such a hurry. She begins to notice specific details about the state of the kitchen: for example, the sugar bag stands open, only half emptied into the sugar bucket. Why did Minnie Wright leave her work undone? Had she been interrupted?

At first, Mrs. Hale feels that she needs to hide her discoveries about the kitchen from Mrs. Peters. She finds and cleans off the only remaining jar of preserves from the cupboard: a jar of cherries. Then, Mrs. Peters asks her to help get the clothes Mrs. Wright wanted from the front room closet.

When they return, Mrs. Hale notices how shabby and worn the clothing is. She comments that Mr. Wright is very cheap, judging by the state of Mrs. Wright’s clothing. When she was a young girl, Minnie Foster had lived in town, wore pretty clothes and sang in the church choir. Mrs. Hale suspects that Minnie had avoided going into town and seeing people because her clothes were so shabby, and she didn’t want people to know.

Mrs. Hale notices that the table is half wiped and half dirty, with the dish towel still lying in the middle of the table. She asks Mrs. Peters if she thinks that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, stating that she doesn’t think so. Mrs. Peters reports that in the carriage on their way to the wrights’ house, the sheriff and the attorney agreed that things look very bad for Minnie Wright. The attorney plans to make an issue of the fact that she says she didn’t wake up while her husband was being strangled in the bed next to her. Mrs. Peters reveals that the missing piece the men must find to ensure her conviction is a motive, such as a sign of strong feeling or anger in the home.

As the women continue to talk, Mrs. Peters discovers a quilt that Minnie Foster was making. The women take out the pieces and examine them. The men come in and make fun of their preoccupation with a quilt during such a serious investigation: “There was a laugh for the ways of women” (153). The women agree that the men should just get on with their important work of finding evidence and leave the women alone to entertain themselves as they wish.

When they leave, Mrs. Peters finds one quilt square with terrible, crooked “crazy sewing” (155), which looks as if it was sewn while Mrs. Wright was extremely upset. Mrs. Hale immediately sits down and takes out the poor stitches and replaces them with neat, even stitches. Mrs. Peters doesn’t try very hard to stop her.

Mrs. Peters looks for paper and string to wrap Mrs. Wright’s clothing in. Instead, she notices a birdcage. The women discuss whether Minnie Wright had a bird, and Mrs. Hale admits that a man came around the year before selling cheap canaries. Mrs. Peters calls Mrs. Hale over when she discovers that the door of the cage is broken, as if it has been opened roughly.

Mrs. Hale admits that she wishes she had made an effort to visit Minnie Wright. She tells Mrs. Peters that John Wright was a good man by most people’s standards, but also hard and cold. She continues, saying that Minnie Foster was like a bird herself. She tells Mrs. Peters to take the quilt to Mrs. Wright, so that she will have something to occupy herself with in jail.

As Mrs. Peters searches the patch bag for more material to take to Mrs. Wright, she discovers a pretty little box. The women discover a dead bird wrapped in a piece of silk—its neck has been broken, deliberately wrung.

The men return, and the county attorney asks them a few questions about what they have been doing but does not pay attention to the quilt squares still laid out on the table, the bird cage, or the women’s answers. Mrs. Hale has hidden the box containing the dead bird in the quilting basket. The men go upstairs to go over the murder scene again.

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale discuss what they believe has happened. Mrs. Hale states that Minnie Wright loved the bird and when John Wright strangled her bird, because he couldn’t stand the noise of its music, Minnie Wright snapped. The silence after the bird’s death was too much for her to bear.

Mrs. Peters repeatedly asserts that they don’t know who killed the bird, just as they don’t know who killed John Wright, for sure. She understands, however, the rage that someone feels when a beloved pet is killed, revealing that a boy killed her kitten right in front of her as a child and how much she had wanted to hurt that boy. In addition, she discloses that she understands the silence of grief in the home, as she lost her first child at nearly two years of age. Despite this understanding, Mrs. Peters says that crime must be punished.

Mrs. Hale berates herself for not visiting Minnie Wright. She says that that too was a horrible crime: who is going to punish her for it? Crying, she says that she should have known that something was amiss with the Wrights. She questions Mrs. Peters as to why and how they know what they know at that moment. Mrs. Peters declares that the men would certainly laugh at them for thinking that a dead canary could have anything to do with the murder.

The men return, continuing their discussion. The county attorney looks over the things that Mrs. Peters wants to take Mrs. Wright in jail and laughs, saying that Mrs. Peters is “married to the law” (160) so she doesn’t need supervision. The Peters and the Hales prepare to leave; the county attorney will stay behind to continue the investigation. The men leave the room for a moment, and Mr. Hale goes outside to ready the horses.

Mrs. Hale forces Mrs. Peters to decide what to do; silently, the women gaze at each other. Suddenly, Mrs. Peters grabs the pretty box containing the dead bird and tries to shove it into her handbag. It won’t fit; the voices of the men indicate that they are about to come back into the kitchen. Mrs. Hale snatches the box from Mrs. Peters and hides it in her pocket.

The county attorney and the sheriff return to the kitchen. The men have not found evidence of the motive they seek. The county attorney comments, sarcastically, that at least they discovered that Mrs. Wright was going to knot her quilt.