Summary
The women are nervous as they open the silk. They see the bird, its neck bent, clearly wrung by someone. Their eyes meet again, and there is a sense of “dawning comprehension, of growing horror.” Mrs. Hale looks at the dead bird, then the broken cage door.
Noises are heard outside and Mrs. Hale slips the box under the quilt pieces and sinks into the chair next to it.
When he enters, Henderson jovially asks the ladies if Minnie was going to quilt it or knot it. Mrs. Hale’s voice wavers as she says knot it, but Henderson does not notice. He sees the birdcage and asks if the bird has flown. Mrs. Hale replies that the cat got it. He asks if there is a cat, and Mrs. Peters says that there isn't one anymore, as cats are superstitious and leave.
Henderson turns back to Peters and says there is no sign of anyone coming in from the outside. He suggests going back upstairs again to go over it piece by piece. The men disappear.
The women sit still but do not look at each other. Finally, they speak. Mrs. Hale says slowly that Minnie liked the bird and was going to bury it in the pretty box. Mrs. Peters breathlessly remembers that, when she was a child, a boy killed her kitten right in front of her; if she hadn’t been held back, she might have hurt him.
Mrs. Hale looks around the room and wonders what it would have been like to have had no children. Mr. Wright would not have liked to have something that sang. Minnie used to sing, and John killed that—as he killed the bird.
Mrs. Peters shifts, saying they don’t know who killed the bird. Mrs. Hale replies that she knew John Wright. The other woman comments that it is a terrible thing that a man was killed while he slept, but Mrs. Hale bursts out that they do not know who killed him. She adds that if a bird sang to one after years and years of silence, then it would be awful after the bird was still.
In an odd tone, Mrs. Peters shares that she knows stillness. When they homesteaded in Dakota and her baby died, it was still. She pulls back from this, though, and says the law must punish crime. All Mrs. Hale can say is that she wishes Mrs. Peters could see Minnie twenty years ago with her ribbons and her singing. She cries out that it is a real crime that she didn’t come visit here. She should have known Minnie needed help. They lived close but it felt far; this shouldn't have been an excuse, though, because they all go through the same thing. Wildly, she asks how Mrs. Peters and she understand—how they know.
Looking at the fruit, Mrs. Hale begs the other woman not to tell Minnie her fruit is all gone—she begs them to tell her it is all right. She turns away. Mrs. Peters reaches for the fruit and looks for something to wrap it in. Her voice high, she wonders what the men would think of them getting upset over a dead canary. Mrs. Hale only grumbles.
The attorney’s voice is heard saying that all is clear except the reason for doing it, but when it comes to juries and women, there needs to be something definite to show—a story, a connection.
Mr. Peters and Mr. Hale are preparing to leave, but Henderson announces he will stay here and look around more. The women’s eyes meet. The sheriff asks if he needs to see the bundle of things Mrs. Peters gathered, and Henderson waves it away as not at all dangerous, joking that Mrs. Peters is “married to the law.”
Mrs. Hale’s hand remains on the sewing basket with the concealed box. She cannot seem to take her hand off, and her eyes feel aflame.
Before going, Peters asks them to look at the windows quickly. Henderson and Peters go out, and Hale goes to attend to the horses.
The women are alone for one final moment. Mrs. Hale springs up. Her eyes meet Mrs. Peters’s, and they hold each other’s gaze with a “steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching.” Mrs. Hale’s eyes look to the basket with the thing in it that would “make certain the conviction of the other woman—the woman who was not there and yet who had been with them all through that hour.”
Mrs. Peters is still, and then she springs into motion. She rushes to the basket, gets the box, and tries to fit the box in her purse—but it does not fit. Desperately, she thinks to take the bird out, but she cannot do it. There is the sound of a knob. Mrs. Hale grabs the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat just as the men return.
The county attorney facetiously comments that they found out that Minnie was going to... What did the women call it? Mrs. Hale holds her pocket and says, “Knot it, Mr. Henderson.”
Analysis
At the end of the short story, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have become the true “jury of peers” to Minnie Wright, determining amongst themselves that Minnie killed John in a type of self-defense. They see his death as warranted for the long, slow killing of Minnie’s spirit, and they know that in the courts of men this would not be considered legitimate. The men cannot see Minnie as anything other than insane or wicked, and they need to find a way to control both her and what she symbolizes.
At the time of the story’s publication, women could not vote, nor serve on juries, nor run for office. Thus, the laws that they were supposed to adhere to were created entirely by men. Minnie will not get a “jury of her peers”; she will not be understood. Marina Angel suggests that the major jurisprudential issue of the story is “whether those who are completely closed out of the law-making and law-applying processes of a society are bound by that society’s laws.”
It is the strangled bird that truly brings Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to their decision to exonerate Minnie in their own eyes, and to prevent the men from successfully pinning a motive on her. In her article, Janet Stobbs Wright references another scholar’s idea that the strangled bird also represents the loss of Minnie’s voice and her “isolated and childless life.” Seeing the bird as a stand-in for Minnie herself, the women come to fully occupy their place of empathy and, importantly, encourage readers to feel that same empathy. Mrs. Peters remembers how she felt when a boy killed her kitten and how desperate she was with the “stillness” of losing her child, and Mrs. Hale allows herself to feel tremendous guilt for not visiting the lonely woman.
The point is not that Minnie did not commit a crime: rather, the nuances of said crime must be taken into account. Law and justice are not the same things. Karen Alkalay-Gut writes that Glaspell suggests “the greater crime, as Mrs. Hale has learned, is to cut oneself off from understanding and communicating with others, and in this context John Wright is the greater criminal and his wife the helpless executioner.”
Wright agrees, saying that Glaspell doesn’t condone vigilante justice but instead stresses “what would otherwise go untold. It makes the case for the defense of an otherwise incomprehensible crime. It gives a voice to what the women are unable to utter: that the male interpretation of the law does not give women their lawful right to a fair trial and that this forces them into silence.” The women in the story “engage in a silent conspiracy of rebellion against man-made law, thereby nullifying it.” Their silence is, ironically, a voice: a voice for the absent Minnie; a voice that Orit Kamir calls “clear and brave, caring and just, genuinely valuable and feminine.” This feminine legal culture “manifests a distinct ethos of compassion and care” and ultimately suggests that a woman must be judged, like anyone, by a real jury of her peers, that the particulars of women’s oppression and marginalization be accounted for, lest justice be precluded.
