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An Analysis Of Susan Glaspell's Play 'A Jury Of Her Peers'

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Susan Glaspell’s play, “A Jury of Her Peers,” revolves around whether or not Minnie Wright strangled her husband, John Wright, to death with a rope. The play gets readers thinking about justice and the law. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, wives of law enforcement officials, are inside the Wright’s house with their husbands. The men are looking for any evidence or motive in relation to the murder, and the women are getting items for Minnie while she is in jail. The women are conflicted between law and justice as they find the motive behind the murder of John. The law would convict Minnie as being guilty, while giving her justice would in turn mean allowing certain actions to happen in special circumstances. Their minds are initially set on the fact
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An interesting part to think about from this play is the fact that by the end of the story, all twelve men had agreed, not guilty for the defendants trial. The question is why would eleven men with the determined thought that the defendant was guilty, change their mind within a few hours and pieces of justified evidence? The final decision stated that the defendant was…“Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. ”(Rose 1957)

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Two symbols that I have found in “A Jury of Her Peers” is Mrs. Wright’s canary bird and wardrobe. Canary birds are known for their singing. Minnie Wright loved to sing, she used to sing in the choir when she was younger. Mr. Wright did not like her singing, so he made her stop. “A thing that sang.

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In his play, many of the characters let the trials continue, but Judge Danforth is the most blameworthy. In the play, his pride and stubbornness prove that Judge Danforth is the

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The story “A Jury of Her Peers” takes place at Minnie Wright farm in Iowa. Minnie is under investigation because she is a suspect for having killed her husband Mr. Wright. Mr. Perter the sheriff, the county persecutor Mr. Henderson and Mr. Hale who is the victim’s neighbor gather at the scene of the crime to investigate what happened there. Two women accompany the man the sheriff wife and Martha Hales. When the group get to the farmhouse they go to the kitchen and Mr. Peters ask Hales to describe what he had saw at the farm house the previous day.

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There are a few examples of this in the play which will be taken further in depth later on. The examples are the testimonies given against the defendant in the play.     One of the testimonies given was that an old man woke up and heard someone shout I'm going to kill you a loud thump then the boy run out of the building. Throughout the story the jurors talk more in depth about the old man’s story and find it to be

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Mr. Hale and his son, Harry, went upstairs and found the body in the bed with a rope around his neck. Alarmed, Mr. Hale told Harry to go to call the police through a telephone across the road while he stayed behind at the Wright's’ residence. The police then arrived to the scene of the crime and took Minnie into custody. We are here today to prove that Minnie Wright is guilty of the premeditated murder of her husband, John Wright. We have evidence that proves that Minnie Wright had motivation to kill her

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In the play Twelve Angry Men, the jurors had to make a decision in determining if a young man accused of murder was guilty or innocent. Looking at the evidence presented, the boy was rightfully found not guilty. Two key reasons that support this conclusion are, the woman across the el tracks was not wearing her glasses, and the amateur stab wound compared to the boy's experience in knife fighting. These reasons demonstrate the lack of actual evidence against the boy.

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Even Mr. Hale was concerned about Minnie. The play, however, does not share the same emotions of how Mr. Hale's words could effect Minnie. The story has a greater influence than the play, invoking certain feelings about justice for abused women. The lack of details in the play "Trifles" is really an injustice to how the readers should feel about Minnie. The complex details that are lacking in the play are displayed freely in the short story "A Jury of Her Peers.

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Minnie’s quilt, the dead bird and its cage, and the kitchen show that living in a man’s world is not easy. In the end, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale recognize that they too have experienced the same loneliness and mistreatment that led Mrs. Wright to murder her husband. The men don't value the women in this story and they don't see them as being very intelligent either. It is for this reason “A jury of her peers” is created. Peers being the women themselves as they stand up, united against the subjugation they have all experienced.

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When one of her high school teachers, Mr. Stewart, raped her Luce lost her faith in people, not that she had much after her mom, Lola, left her, but she did not trust them anymore which I why she moved far away from the town. Luce had an ethical dilemma that no person would wish upon their worst enemy; she had to decide whether to file a report against Mr. Stewart and have her name drug through the mud, but due to the burning of the high school it already was, as well as relive the night of the rape (Frazier, p. 75). Her dad, the Sherriff, Lit strongly urged/convinced her not to, he said, “A little shit of a lawyer can do you in a couple hours what you won’t let go of for the rest of your life. Stewart’s got a place in this town” (Frazier, p. 78). Luce’s ethics were made from the law, a virtue of non-violence, but the people and perceptions made her a victim that could not do

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In Susan Glaspell's play “Trifles,” there is a difference between the men and women’s way of perceiving evidence to Mr. Wright’s murder case. The men spend most of their time searching for solid evidence upstairs where Mr. Wright's murder takes place. However, the women spend most of their time in Mrs. Wright’s kitchen. Instead of seeking tangible evidence, they inspect the condition of the items and acknowledge how they have been muddled around. Different perspectives lead to a variety of discoveries such as the women’s way of perceiving evidence.

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Talking about Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters “the two characters begin to reconstruct the accused woman’s life. They do so through several means; memories of her, memories of their own lives (similar to hers in many ways), and speculation about her feelings and responses to the conditions of her life” (Holstein 283.) The two women immediately placed themselves in Minnie Wrights position. And while reconstructing Mrs. Wright life based on their own memories and emotions they acknowledge the murders missing clue “Minnie’s dead pet bird” (Holstein

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Reasonable doubt proves that critical thinking is important when someone’s life is in someone else’s hands. “Twelve Angry Men” by Reginald Rose, is a play about twelve jury members who must deliberate and decide the fate of a man who is accused of murdering his father. These twelve men must unanimously agree on whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty without reasonable doubt. Just like the jurors, the readers of this play have not witnessed the crime that took place before the trial started. Everyone, but the writer, is in the dark about who committed the crime.

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When the fellow housewives probing around the house of John and Minnie Wright they saw the small things that showed that she was distressed, for example when they saw that the quilt that she had been working on at the time was poorly knotted they took the time to correct the quilting, and when they saw that Minnie’s bird was wrapped in silk and held in a beautiful embellished box they realized why she killed her husband. Although Mrs.Peters is the wife to the sherrif she hides what she finds in the Wright’s home because she can relate to what Minnie was going through. So although when Minnie went to court she presumably sat in front of a jury filled with men she had justice through other women understanding her troubles when it counted. Throughout the story the main idea is to find what was the motive of Minnie Wright to kill her husband, although this story will not just come out and blatantly state the reason, it shows the audience through showing the gender roles of the time and what they meant to the women.

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During the 18th century many countries throughout Europe went through a period that would forever change the way they thought about society, politics, philosophy, science, and even religion - such period was better known as the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. After the Thirty Year’s War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, several German writers wrote frankly about the perishes of war, criticized the ideas of nationalism and warfare that led to such terrible times for the people. Among such authors were Hugo Grotius and John Comenius, who were of the first Enlightenment minds to go against tradition and propose better solutions. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions.

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