Susan Glaspell's Trifles And A Jury Of Her Peers

Susan Glaspell was born in 1876 in Davenport, Iowa and studied at Drake University in Des Moines. In 1931, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Allison’s House, which resembles Emily Dickinson’s life. In college, she had published a few short stories in the Youth’s Companion and had worked as college correspondent for a local newspaper, and on graduating she became a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. In 1901, she returned to her native Davenport to devote herself to writing; her stories, mainly local-colour pieces set in Freeport (Davenport), were soon appearing regularly in such magazines as the Ladies’ Home Journal, the American, and Harper’s. Glaspell wrote both the short story, “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles. Both pieces tell

Glaspell wrote many pieces that tried to show women’s roles in society, and she hid many messages throughout her works. Even though these stories have the same plot there are some differences between them such as the titles, the characterization, and the form in which story is told.

The title Trifles makes the reader seem as if the play is about particular objects, which is true because the play focuses on objects that judge Minnie Foster. The play is more focused on what actually happened and how it happened, as the story moves clearly along from one scene to the next. “A Jury of Her Peers”, the short story which was written one year after the play, focuses more on the people trying to figure out what happened. The short story is named A Jury of Her Peers because Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peter basically decided the fate of Minnie. They both decided not to turn in the

Since the short story allows for more description, especially of the details of the characters interaction, it allows for more insight into the minds of the characters, as opposed to insight that the audience would gain by watching actors on a stage. This shifts the judgement from the actual objects in the play and Mrs. Hale and Peters simply interpreting them for the audience to actually giving the judgement of Minnie Foster to Hale and Peters by giving us a little more insight into how they are reacting to the entire episode. The males have little depth in the story, but they have considerably more depth in the story than in the play. 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. We do not get the same sense of character development as in the story because unlike in the story where the reader gets background knowledge on how the characters feel it is not like that in the play. In the short story “A Jury of Her Peers” written by Susan Glaspell, the author rewrites the Play “Trifles” in a narrative form. A Jury of Her Peers has the same characters as Trifles, but now the reader gets to hear what the characters were thinking and feeling. The narrative elaborates on how the characters met and even how they feel about one another. For example, on