Summary
Martha Hale feels the north wind when she opens the door and grabs her scarf. She looks around her kitchen, scandalized that she has to leave it in the state that it is: her bread is ready for mixing and only half the flour is sifted. She hates leaving things half-done, but her husband told her the sheriff’s wife wanted another woman to come along.
Hale calls for his wife again and she comes outside, where Mr. Hale, Mr. Peters, Mrs. Peters, and Henderson are waiting in the buggy. Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, does not much look like a sheriff’s wife: she is thin and quiet. Peters looks very much the part of a sheriff, however; he seems to want to demonstrate that he knows the difference between criminals and non-criminals.
The buggy comes in view of the Wright house, which strikes Mrs. Hale as very lonesome. It is in a hollow and the poplar trees are scraggly. The men are talking about what happened.
Mrs. Peters tells Mrs. Hale nervously that she is glad she came with her. Mrs. Hale is reluctant to step over the threshold. She remembers how she’d always told herself to come and see Minnie here, but she never had (Minnie Wright used to be Minnie Foster, but that was twenty years ago).
Henderson, the county attorney, calls the women in away from the door. Mr. Peters changes his tone to make it seem like it is time for official business, asking Mr. Hale to relate to Henderson what he saw when he came here yesterday morning.
Henderson looks around first and asks if things seem the same, and Hale replies yes. Henderson adds that someone should have been left here, but Peters explains that his hands were full yesterday.
Mrs. Hale looks at her husband with a sinking feeling. She knows he often tells a story in a meandering, mixed-up way; she hopes he will be plain now and not say unnecessary things that would make it harder for Minnie. She sees how queer he looks—like he will be sick.
Hale begins by saying that he and his oldest son were taking a load of potatoes to town and Hale thought he ought to stop by John Wright’s place to see if he could get them to take a telephone. Wright had said no to him once before and stated that he liked his peace and quiet. Hale thought that, if he spoke to Mrs. Wright, he might be successful, as women like the telephone. He adds, though, that it doesn't seem like what his wife wanted would mean anything to John.
Mrs. Hale inwardly groans at the unnecessary comment. Henderson prods Hale on. Hale explains that he knocked and it was quiet inside, so he opened the door and saw Mrs. Wright in the rocker.
Everyone looks over at the rocker. Mrs. Hale immediately thinks it does not look like Minnie Foster of twenty years ago: it sags and is missing a rung. Henderson asks how she looked, and Hale replies “queer.” When asked how so, he says she looked sort of done-up and like she didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t pay much attention to him, not even looking at him as he greeted her and said he wanted to see John. She then laughed, before saying "no," dully. When Hale asked why, she said, blankly, that he was dead. Hale was flummoxed and she nodded. He asked "where," and she pointed upstairs. He did not know what to do, and he asked what John died of. She replied that he died of a rope around his neck.
Hale stops talking and looks at the rocker. No one speaks. It is almost as if everyone were picturing Minnie in it.
Henderson asks what Hale did next. He stepped outside to call to Harry. He brought Harry in for help; they went upstairs and saw John. Henderson interrupts and says they ought to go upstairs, but he tells him to finish the story. Hale continues that his first thought was to get the rope off, but Harry said the man was dead and they better not touch anything. Downstairs, Minnie was just sitting; Hale asked if anyone had been notified, and she said no. He asked who did it, and she said she didn’t know. She said she was sleeping when it happened. Hale was surprised that she did not wake up, and she simply said she slept soundly. Hale sent Harry to a neighbor to call the coroner. While Harry was gone, Minnie merely moved from the rocker to a smaller chair and sat there with her hands clasped and her eyes downcast. Hale tried to talk to her and said he was here about a telephone. At that, she made a little laugh and stopped, scared.
Henderson looks up from writing. Abashed, Hale says maybe “scared” wasn't the right word. Harry returned with Dr. Lloyd, Henderson, and Mrs. Peters, and that was all.
Hale looks relieved at concluding his tale. Henderson says they can go upstairs now. First, he looks around the kitchen and asks the sheriff if there is anything important here that could point to a motive. The sheriff laughs a bit and shakes his head that it’s only “kitchen things.”
Henderson looks at the cupboards and sticks his hand in one, immediately drawing it out ruefully. He says it is a mess. Mrs. Peters speaks up, saying it was Minnie’s fruit. She explains that Minnie was worried last night that it was cold, so the fire could go out and the jars could burst. Mr. Peters laughs about a woman being held for murder and worrying about her preserves.
Mr. Hale smiles that women are used to worrying about trifles. The women move a little closer together. The county attorney also smiles and gallantly asks what would they all do without the ladies. The women say nothing in response. Henderson goes to wash his hands; when he goes to wipe them, he makes a comment about the dirty roller and how Minnie was “not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?”
Mrs. Hale simply replies that there is a lot of work to be done on a farm. Henderson cheerfully says that is true, but other farms in Dickson County have better roller situations. She responds that towels get dirty quickly, and men’s hands aren’t always clean. He laughs that she is loyal to her sex. He then asks if, she and Mrs. Wright were friends, given that they were neighbors. She shakes her head and says she hasn't been here for more than a year. Henderson asks if it is because she didn't like Minnie, and she says that she liked her well enough. She adds that farmers’ wives have their hands full, and then she stops. Henderson prods her. She says that this never seemed like a cheerful place.
Upon hearing this, Henderson agrees heartily and says it doesn't seem like Minnie had the home-making instinct. Mrs. Hale cannot help but add that Mr. Wright didn’t either; Henderson catches this and asks if they didn't get along. Mrs. Hale decisively replies that she did not say that, but she adds that any place with John Wright in it would not thereby be made more cheerful.
Before Henderson leads the men upstairs, he allows Mrs. Peters to gather some things for Minnie. Henderson smiles that Mrs. Peters is one of them and that perhaps the two women will stumble on a clue. Mr. Hale wonders aloud if the women would know a clue if they saw it.
The women are alone now. Mrs. Hale begins to arrange the dirty dishes under the sink that Henderson had dislodged. She grumbles about men in her kitchen, snooping and criticizing. It seems unfair to have people come in here and talk about Minnie for not having things cleaned up when she had to come away in a hurry.
Mrs. Hale notices a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover is off and beside it is a half-full paper bag. She muses that Minnie was putting the sugar in the bag. She thinks of her own flour at home and how she was interrupted, and she wonders what interrupted Minnie. Why was her work half-done? She sees Mrs. Peters watching her.
Mrs. Hale grabs a chair and stands on it to look at the cupboard, murmuring that it would be a shame if all the fruit were all gone. Inside, she finds a jar of cherries that is all right. It seems to be the only one. She steps down and wipes the bottle off. She says Minnie would feel bad if she knew all her work was gone, and she remembers her own cherries.
Mrs. Hale thinks about sitting in the rocker but finds that she cannot. She steps away and imagines Minnie there. Mrs. Peters’s voice breaks in, saying she must find the things from the front closet and asking if Mrs. Hale is coming with her.
Analysis
A Jury of Her Peers is a short story based on true events. Glaspell is a master of:
• creating a mood and a feeling of suspense
• showing the subtle nuances of character development
• affecting and guiding the reader’s sympathy, without doing so in a heavy-handed way
• dealing with complex themes such as gender relations and the law vs. justice
The story is told in the third person, but the reader is immediately made to see Mrs. Martha Hale as the character which they follow and identify with. Even though she knows why she is being called away from her kitchen and the reader does not, we are right there with her for every clue she discovers and every nuance of Minnie’s life she considers. Her skepticism towards Mrs. Peters and her worrying about whether or not her own husband will say something ill-advised make the reader similarly anxious, and attuned to the subtle changes in her regard of the other woman.
In this first section, Glaspell lays out her main themes. First, there is the difference between the men and the women in terms of the spheres in which they operate, their attitudes and behavior, and their regard of the other gender. Critic Marina Angel notes that the men are “constantly talking and moving, [and] exercise their dominion over the entire house, the grounds, and its outbuildings. The women, relegated to the kitchen, communicate by silent glances and halting and interrupted speech.” Through the way the men talk, they seem to think that women’s jobs are inconsequential and that women themselves are lesser in terms of intelligence and perspicacity. Mr. Peters mocks Minnie for “worrying about her preserves,” and Mr. Hale adopts a serious tone of voice as he laughs that “women are used to worrying over trifles.” He also curries favor with the other men by wondering if “the women [would] know a clue if they did come upon it?” Critic Karen Alkalay-Gut points out how Mr. Hale is first somewhat comprehensive of Minnie’s dilemma and demonstrates some care for what his words might mean for her fate, but that he is then “influenced by the attitudes of his peers” and “identifies himself as a man by aligning himself against the women.”
Perhaps most notably, Henderson decides that Minnie Wright does not have a good housekeeping instinct. This is a frustrating and ironic comment to the women for many reasons: Henderson himself messed up the pots and pans and did not keep the fire going so that the jars of preserves would not burst; men are messy and often callously unaware of just how messy they are; being a farmer’s wife is a full-time, often thankless job; Minnie could have been busy or otherwise unable to have everything perfectly clean; and, as is revealed later, John was a stingy man and did not make it easy for Minnie to keep house as she may have wanted to. Mrs. Hale comments, “I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen...snoopin’ round and criticizin’,” as well as, “Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up when she had to come away in such a hurry.” Overall, the male characters’ “habitual belittlement, negation, bantering abuse, and condescension of their wives and female neighbors” clearly “takes its toll -if you hear it enough, you begin to believe it. And these women hear it, Glaspell makes clear, relentlessly. It is as present to them as the air they breathe.”
Continuing with the male interpretation of the kitchen, Alkalay-Gut explains that there is “the impossibility of perfection when the laws of the kitchen are created and violated by men.” Everything that the men see as evidence of Minnie’s slovenliness, the women see as something different: as something demonstrating Minnie was interrupted. The men in the story are well aware of the difference between the kitchen and the outside world, but their impulse is to “trivialize the laws of the kitchen.” Even if the bad stove were to be pointed out to the men, they likely wouldn’t see it for what it is: an example of how “the mutual responsibility of husband and wife has been violated.”
Glaspell shows the process by which the women—the two in the kitchen, and the absent woman who haunts the space—grow closer together as they acknowledge their similarities. One of the ways in which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters do this is to look at those pieces of evidence that the men also see, to an extent, and interpret them in a different way. Critic Mary M. Bendel Simso explains that the men are all representatives of the Law (attorney, sheriff, witness) and are “oriented to a mechanistic view of legal propriety...For them, evidence is factual and their version of ‘justice’ is based solely upon a consideration of the facts they gather and a retribution fueled by vengeance.” The women, though, “are Minnie Wright’s legitimate counsel, jury, and judge.” They ask different questions than the men do and decide that a different crime has been committed; they know that “true Justice will only be served if [Minnie] is protected from the Law.”
