Comparing Glaspell's Trifles And A Jury Of Her Peers

Based on a true story, the play “Trifles” was first published in 1916 written for the acting troupe Susan Glaspell had began, and was written in 10 days. The short story adaptation “A Jury of Her Peers” was published in 1917 and considered quite controversial and disturbing. Which could have been because the two pieces were inspired by a real murder that Susan Glaspell covered at the Des Moines Daily News, the newspaper she reported for. The play follows the events surrounding the murder of John Wright, and his wife who is accused of killing him, Minnie Wright. However the two characters do not have any lines in the play. In her play “Trifles” and short story “A Jury of Her Peers”, Susan Glaspell makes several significant changes such as the …show more content…
The males have little depth in the play, but they have considerably more depth in the story. This is once again probably due to the fact that in the short story Susan Glaspell could describe the character interaction in considerably more detail, while in the play all of that was left up to the actors. Consequently, we do not get the same sense of character development as in the story. As for the female characters of Mrs.Hale and Mrs.Peters, their dialogue remains the same and while Glaspell uses basically the same dialogue and action in both works she is able to elicit much stronger feelings in her short story by including descriptive passages to accompany the dialogue in her narration. These passages evoke intense feelings from the characters and introduce new emotions. The introduction of new feelings gives the story a more passionate impact on the reader and more emotional depth. The emotional depth of “A Jury of Her Peers” allows the characters sentiments to be felt by the reader more easily than the sentiments conveyed by the drama “Trifles”. The intensity and range of emotions created by Glaspell’s use of narration makes the emotional impact of “A Jury of Her Peers” greater than that of …show more content…
The narration in “A Jury of Her Peers” makes these emotions more vivid by exaggerating the characters’ actions which places more emphasis on the feelings that provoked the action. In “Trifles”, the passage “We don’t know who killed him. We don’t know.” is delivered by Mrs. Peters “With rising voice” (Speech 130). But in “A Jury of Her Peers”, Glaspell has Mrs. Peters whisper the same passage “wildly” as if she is frantic to believe Minnie is innocent (182). Both passages use the same words, but the passage from “A Jury of Her Peers” has a stronger emotional impact simply because of the exaggerated expression of Mrs. Peters in the descriptive narration of the story.As well as giving more impact to the characters emotions and introducing some new sentiments, Glaspell also uses new passages of text to describe the setting of the story. New passages of text included in “A Jury of Her Peers” allow Glaspell to have more emotional impact on the reader by describing the setting of the story for the reader. In “A Jury of Her Peers”, the setting of the story is established by Glaspell before the characters ever enter the farmhouse. Glaspell’s initial description of the farmhouse is described with Mrs. Hale’s thought “it looked very lonesome” as the party of characters approach the house (“A Jury of Her Peers”, 557). This foreshadows the