Her Peers Trifles

Susan Glaspell’s short story A Jury of Her Peers was written in 1917 based loosely on the murder of John Hossack in 1900, which she covered as a journalist while working in Des Moines Daily News. In her short story,she uses stylistic elements such as, using an omniscient tone to talk in third-person,giving a third-person point of view and a knowing all perspective of the story. Glaspell also uses the manipulation of setting to describe the roles of women and their oppression. She clearly uses her narrative voice to show that the men felt different about the women. She also does this by having the men refer solely to their married names instead of their actual names to portray that the women are only property and nothing else.when they speak

They underestimate them. For example, the sheriff had looked around the kitchen and made the comment “ “Nothing here but kitchen things”,he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things” in this scene, we see how the sheriff, had little to no regard towards that the women would be doing anything outside of the kitchen. As the story progresses, we see the restrictions that the men upholded in the lives of their wives. The transition from a life without a man to a life with them. For example, “She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively--when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was twenty years ago." Here, we can tell that the married life for Mrs. Foster has changed, she isn't the same the girl she was twenty years ago. Throughout those 20 years, she has become the bird in the cage that cannot escape otherwise. The canary holds an immense amount of symbolism to the oppression that Mrs. Foster has withheld from John Wright. It is also made clear that if the women were convicted “but you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing--something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it." they would receive a harsher punishment, a whole story made up because they were women. Mrs. Peters and Hales tried to justify that the actions of Mrs. Foster.In addition, it is noticed that the canary has been heard by others such as Mrs.Peters and Minnie Foster has not been heard by anyone. She has been isolated and entrapped with her own thoughts which can only lead to one thing,trauma. Her mental state also vanishing. She had been so degraded and limited for what she could do that she had the final straw. The state of her oppression would result