Historical and Literary Contexts

Susan Glaspell came of age at the beginning of the twentieth century and was actually ahead of her time in embracing many of the liberal political causes and experimental literary movements that came to be a part of what is now known as the modernist period. Through her marriage to the radical George Cram Cook and their friendship with another Davenport resident, Floyd Dell, she became one of a group of early twentieth century intellectuals who questioned traditional definitions, particularly of marriage and women's roles in society. During the twenties, Floyd Dell was editor of the well-known socialist-leaning journal The Masses. Living near him in Greenwich Village, Glaspell and Cook were steeped in all the new movements of the age: socialism, Freud, unions, pacifism, birth control, women's right to vote. All these challenges to traditional society belonged to the group that Glaspell joined. Her participation as one of the leading lights of the Provincetown Players should have assured her a permanent place in literary history, as it did her male counterpart in this experimental venture, Eugene O'Neill. Yet until Trifles appeared in an anthology of women's writing in 1970, Glaspell, so well-known in her own time, had been totally forgotten.

At first look, "A Jury of Her Peers" seems to have little to do with the innovative, often radical propositions that Glaspell's circle championed. Set in her childhood world of rural Iowa, the drama involves farm people who have no notion of the causes that shook Greenwich Village. The women's concerns are their preserves, their sewing, their children. The murder of a stalwart farmer by his reclusive wife sends shock waves, but it is a thing that everyone is sure can be explained. The surface level of the story, however, is exactly what the story itself critiques. If we look only through a traditional lens and only for evidence that fits our expectations, we miss reality, and we allow a false order to stand and judge for us.

Glaspell's play Trifles and the story made from it ask a "jury" of the murdering Minnie Wright to judge her, as peers, and finally to judge not her at all but an entrenched, male authority that long ago dismissed women's lives as "trifles." "A Jury of Her Peers" is about violence, a subject much on the minds of Glaspell's peers in 1916, with a war raging in Europe, with unrest among increasingly impoverished urban workers and increasingly victimized African Americans, with a host of new social problems accompanying urbanization and the change of the economy from rural to industrial. Minnie Wright's violence represents a very real threat to authority and official institutions. That her women peers judge her innocent, even justified, to the degree that they actively become her accomplices gives a sign of a revolution in the making. An interesting comparison to this story is Janie's trial in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Here, too, a woman murdered her husband, her voice and self-preservation were figuratively if not literally her motive, and women provided a protective circle for the murderess.

Glaspell's drama disappeared from American literature. By the 1940s, when new criticism began to dominate the creation of an American canon, the "trifles" of kitchen, home, and hearth were again just that, and anthologies were filled up with works that privileged the myths of escape, of the hero's quest, the hunt for whale and bear-myths that identified women with entrapment and constriction. "A Jury of Her Peers," we can note, actually fits the male myths of escape and freedom in its own quiet way. Here a woman's dreams, her need for liberty and voice, are thwarted in her home. If she were Huck Finn, or Ike McCaslin, or Ishmael, we would understand immediately. Glaspell is writing about how we read in gendered ways, understanding all too well, as her story shows, how reading through a masculinist set of values silences women's stories, as it silenced her own. A decade after Glaspell penned "A Jury of Her Peers," Hemingway would take up this question in the story "Hills Like White Elephants," which likewise critiques the incompatibility of men's and women's talk. His story has been in the canon ever since its writing.

The importance of "A Jury of Her Peers" to the new feminist critical movement that gathered momentum in the late 1970s is reflected in the way that Annette Kolodny uses the story in her groundbreaking 1980 essay, "A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts." Kolodny insists that what Glaspell gives us is "a fictive rendering of the dilemma of the woman writer." The author must, she says, "like Minnie Foster, be able to call upon a shared context with her audience; where she cannot, or dare not, she may revert to silence, to the imitation of male forms, or, like the narrator in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' to total withdrawal and isolation into madness." Glaspell, like her character Minnie, shares with her audience the familiar context of women's and men's opposing spheres of power. There, we find the truth by learning how to hear, how to read, and how to respect the spaces where women's lives take place.

In her groundbreaking study, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1970), Carol Gilligan makes several points that have a clear bearing on Glaspell's story. Indeed, Glaspell seems in this early work to define what In a Different Voice proved through psychological testing of young men's and women's thought and language processes. Gilligan discovered, for instance, that there are critical differences in men's and women's approaches to moral problem-solving that are reflected in their "voices." The differences, she stresses, "arise in a social context where factors of social status and power combine with reproductive biology to shape the experiences of males and females and the relations between the sexes." Women see the world and make decisions on the basis of relational thinking, in part because of their cultural experiences of interconnection and inequality. They see moral problems in terms of responsibilities, more than abstract principles of justice. Such differences abound in "A Jury of Her Peers" and raise the final important questions for a drama that is, as the title indicates, about how we judge and who are equals. An "ethic of justice," Gilligan concludes, involves both "fairness" and "care." When she says that "just as inequality adversely affects both parties in an unequal relationship, so too violence is destructive for everyone involved," she is voicing the realization that two women, as jury, reach as they try to judge their peer. -L.H.M.

Photograph courtesy of the Shelburne Museum, Inc.

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