Feminism In Susan Glaspell's A Jury Of Her Peers

Superior Essays
The short story, “A Jury of Her Peers”, is a story that is covered with the theme of feminism and written by Susan Glaspell. The idea of Glaspell’s story came from one of her earlier literary work, a one-act play entitled Trifles. This one-act play that she had written is also a product of one of Glaspell’s work, years before she wrote the play. This work is a news story that she covered while she was still a journalist. The news story was about a murder of a man named John which is the primary background story of both Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers”. All three of these Glaspell works uses this story of a murder and investigation to tell a story about the powers of women’s’. Excluding the news story, Glaspell’s stories features two women …show more content…
These messages and meanings of what the story is telling or what the story is essentially about can be summarize in one or a few words. These few words can have the eye-capturing or even the long lasting thought it leaves in the readers. This is what a title is. With this idea, Glaspell perfectly chooses the correct and fitting words for her two literary gems. For her one-act play and her short story, the message and meaning is the same. With the meaning and message being the same, the title’s significance for both is also basically the same. Glaspell uses one word for her play, Trifles, while on the other hand she uses multiple words or the short story. Nevertheless, both titles did their job amazingly. For the short story, the title Trifles has two important purpose. Its first purpose is to foreshadow of what is going to happen in the story. It foreshadows the story in a subtle way by giving the readers a look at what the theme of the story is. The second purpose of this singular word title is to indicate an irony in the story. It depicts irony because in the story the trifles, or the little problems, in the life of Minnie are the reasons why the men of the …show more content…
The story is like an actual trial for several reasons. One main reason is that it contains the essential elements of a trial. A trial consists of a crime and a defendant who is being accused of doing the crime. The defendant’s fate is determined by a group of people who looks into the evidence and story of the crime. The jury eventually agrees on an outcome after outweighing the sides. “A Jury of Her Peers” contains all of these elements in itself. The defendant is Minnie and the crime is the murder of her husband. She is the main suspect of her husband’s homicide. Her fate was determined by Martha and Mrs. Peters. The two women are the jury of this “trial” for they contemplate and try to understand the evidence and the motive of Minnie. The two women eventually decide to protect their own kind. The reason they decide to not give away the clues is because of how they are depicted in the story. The men in the story are depicted to be someone who is the more superior in both power and abilities between the two genders. The men in the story believe that “they are dignified to solve” the crime for it is “simply their duties”. On the contrary, the women are depicted to be the lower of the two classes. The men and even the women themselves believe that it is the women’s duty to “be loyal” to their counterparts. The men even jokes within each other how

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