Literary Interpretation
Perhaps the
key presence in "A Jury of Her Peers"
is actually an absence-the absence of Minnie Wright
from her home, where the action of the drama takes
place. While she is the focus, and her feelings,
her motives, and her fate are the subject, she has
no voice or character, an acknowledgment of the
nature of her life with John Wright. We never hear
her speak. A man reports what she says. We hear
singing that is recalled as another woman's memory
of her. We hear a creaking of a rocking chair that
again only recalls a noise she once made. Notice
how the play begins with Mrs. Hale and her scattered
thoughts as she tries to concentrate on baking bread.
Mrs. Hale's kitchen is duplicated at the Wrights',
where half-sifted flour becomes the first of several
connections between these two neighboring women
and their frustration with stunted lives. Singing
as well functions as an outward sign, as do all
the references to "voice," or lack of
it. The male characters have loud voices and use
them to tell "the" main story-how John
Wright's body was discovered in his bed with a rope
around his neck.
The drama divides spaces and then takes the men
to the places offstage that they mistakenly choose
as the site of their investigation. Center stage,
however, in a space that they only denigrate, are
the rooms in which Minnie Wright had
her being. The sheriff's and county attorney's disinterest
in women's "place" reflects a cultural
reality. They speak for the official world, for
authority and power. Their ignorance as to where
to look to understand a woman's life also reflects
Minnie Wright's husband's insensitivity. What Mrs.
Peters and Mrs. Hale put up with, in the men's dismissive
comments, was Minnie Wright's daily fare. The drama
is about "reading," and all the "trifles"
of kitchen and parlor speak tellingly of a woman's
life, dreams, despair, and final rebellion. Bread
making, sewing, an apron, a music box, a piece of
quilt: who pays any attention to these minor and
innately undramatic activities and objects? In the
drama, the word know also reverberates as
the story questions how men and women learn to interpret
the w
orld
around them in incompatible ways.
A story in which a house
and housekeeping are major motifs helps us see how
"A Jury of Her Peers" fits a major, though
often unacknowledged, theme of American literature.
Works like Poe's "The Fall of the House of
Usher," Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Alcott's
Little Women, Hawthorne's The House of
Seven Gables, even Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
and more recently Eudora Welty's "Livvie"
and Alice Walker's The Color Purple all use
the architecture, design, and decoration of houses
to indicate social position, disorder, isolation,
and confinement. Houses indeed are an important
American symbol ("A house divided against itself
cannot stand," Lincoln said). They are a measure
of "domestic tranquillity" or threats
to it, major cultural preoccupations addressed in
literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
"A Jury of Her Peers" balances men's
and women's opposing stories, ways of reading and
relating, and means of expressing self. Yet interestingly,
Minnie and John Wright are joined in their use of
violence. That Minnie Wright finally resorts to
a violent retaliation against her husband's gratuitous
cruelty is a frightening message. That she is silent,
only present when two sensitive and newly articulate
women reconstruct her in their own language, raises
final questions. Will Minnie Wright ever have a
story of her own? Is a woman's violence in response
to institutionally validated male violence the only
way to achieve freedom and voice? The "knot"
in the quilting that the women speak of, a term
that amuses the men, is an appropriate final symbol.
It speaks to the riddle of Minnie Wright's motives
that the men cannot solve as long as they believe
that women "wouldn't know a clue if they saw
one." The knot also speaks to the larger problem
of how to cross the chasm that divides men's and
women's perceptions, leaving women to unravel mysteries
and then keep real stories hidden in a dark pocket
where men will never think to look. -L.H.M
Photograph courtesy of the Montana Historical Society
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