Female characters in “A Jury of Her Peers” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”
Writers from different centuries wrote stories that reflected gender altitude to gender roles of their period of time. Changes in this sphere caused an appearance of works with the similar background and different endings. Short stories A Jury of Her Peers and the Lamb to the Slaughter, written by Susan Glaspell and Roald Dahl respectively, are a good example of this statement. Both works have the same core part of the plot, but show different atmosphere and final.
A Jury of Her Peers was based on the real murder case that happened in 1900. It tells a story of Minnie Foster (Wright) who was suspected of her husband’s murder. Sheriff’s wife and Martha Hale were invited as “attesting witnesses”. While men did not treat female characters as equal participants, they became persons who found out the motive of the crime and played an important role in its withholding. The Lamb to the Slaughter is amore modern story; it was written in 1953. The main character is Mary Maloney, a pregnant wife of a policeman, who decided to leave her. The woman was shocked and killed her husband with a lamb leg that
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The short story did not have evidences that her husband was mean to her before the described evening. Mary was shown as a stereotypical housewife, who cared about the housed and calmly waited for her partner: “now and again she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety, merely to please herself” (Dahl). But she demonstrated an unpredictable astuteness when her little world was destroyed. Mary also killed her husband, but did not shut down like Minnie, and developed a successful plan how to escape responsibility. The woman was shocked, but did not lose her countenance. The last sentence in Dahl’s story “And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle” showed the woman was not in the affective state and acted