Summary
The women hurry back from the cold room and Mrs. Hale examines the clothes. She can see the black skirt looks shabby and made-over, and he muses aloud that Minnie may have kept to herself because it is hard to enjoy things when you feel shabby. Twenty years ago, she used to wear pretty clothes—back in the days when she was Minnie Foster singing in the choir.
Mrs. Hale folds the clothes neatly and looks at Mrs. Peters, first annoyed, then realizing that perhaps she underestimated the sheriff’s wife—it seems like maybe she sees more than expected. Mrs. Peters says that Minnie also wanted an apron and that this would probably make a person feel natural, especially if you’re used to wearing one. She goes to the drawer and picks one, as well as a small shawl.
Suddenly, Mrs. Hale cannot contain herself and moves close to Mrs. Peters, asking her if she thinks Minnie did it. Mrs. Peters looks frightened and says she doesn't know. Mrs. Hale sighs and says she doesn’t think she did, worrying about her apron and fruit.
Upstairs, voices are heard. Mrs. Peters hushes her own voice and says that her husband seems to think it looks bad for Minnie: that Henderson is going to be sarcastic and make fun of Minnie for saying she didn’t wake up. She adds that they also think the rope is a funny way to kill a man. Mrs. Hale accedes, saying her husband said the same thing because there was a gun in the house. Mrs. Peters says that Henderson is looking for a motive, something that shows “anger—or sudden feeling.” Mrs. Hale resolutely says she sees nothing like that here.
However, a moment later her eyes dart to the dish towel on the middle of the kitchen table, the latter of which is half clean and half dirty. She looks back at the sugar bag; things were clearly begun but not finished. Finally, she says she wonders what they’re finding up there, observing that it seems unfair and sneaky to lock Minnie up and then come into her house to try to make the house turn against her.
All Mrs. Peters replies is, “the law is the law.” Mrs. Hale acknowledges this brusquely, then tries to stoke the fire in the stove. Standing up, she repeats agrees that the law is the law, but that “a bad stove is a bad stove. How’d you like to cook with this?” Her thoughts fly to what it would be like to deal with this stove year after year. Mrs. Peters says simply that a person gets discouraged and loses heart.
Both women are silent, hearing the men moving above. Mrs. Peters gets that look in her eyes again—”that look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else.”
Mrs. Peters goes to hang up her fur tippet and notices a large sewing basket. She exclaims that Minnie was piecing a quilt, and takes out some of the pieces. Mrs. Hale admires the log cabin pattern.
Neither woman hears the men returning as they are looking at the pieces and wondering if she was going to piece it or just knot it. Henderson gently mocks the comment, and the men laugh over “the ways of women.”
The men head out to the barn and Mrs. Hale resentfully says she doesn’t think it is strange to take time with little things while the men are getting evidence. Mrs. Peters apologetically says that the men have things on their mind.
The women continue to look at the quilt pieces; Mrs. Peters says, in a strange tone, to look at one piece. All the rest are nice and even, but this one piece is not. The women’s eyes meet and something flashes between them, but they pull away.
Mrs. Hale sits for a moment, then immediately starts to pull out a bad stitch or two. Mrs. Peters helplessly says they ought not to change anything, but Mrs. Hale persists. Both women are silent while Mrs. Hale sews. In a timid voice, Mrs. Peters finally asks her what she thinks Minnie was so nervous about. Mrs. Hale simply volunteers that she doesn’t know and maybe Minnie was tired.
Mrs. Peters’s face tightens and her eyes have that look again, but she matter-of-factly says she ought to wrap the clothes up.
Mrs. Hale looks closely at the quilt piece and sees how startling the difference between the two is. Holding it also makes her feel odd—as if Minnie’s thoughts were trying to communicate with her.
Mrs. Peters cuts in and says there is a birdcage, and she asks if Minnie had a bird. Mrs. Hale doesn't know, but she remembers a man selling canaries last year; perhaps she bought one. Mrs. Peters laughs a bit and says it is funny to think of one here, but there must have been—why would there be a cage? Mrs. Hale suggests the cat got it, but Mrs. Peters replies that Minnie is afraid of cats; yesterday, when she was brought to her house, she was very upset and asked for the Peters cat to be taken away.
Mrs. Hale smiles that her sister was like that, but Mrs. Peters does not reply. She is examining the birdcage and says that the door is broken; it seems like someone roughly pulled the hinge off. Their eyes meet again, their looks apprehensive. They wish they could leave.
After a moment, Mrs. Hale sighs that she should have come over sometime when Minnie was here. Mrs. Peters tries to tell her she was busy, but Mrs. Hale cuts her off and says no, it was always just so cheerless here, so isolated. Mrs. Peters gently tells her not to reproach herself. Mrs. Hale muses that not having children makes less work, but that would also have made the Wright house very quiet. She asks if Mrs. Peters knew John Wright.
Mrs. Peters replies no, but that she saw him in town and heard he was a good man. Grimly, Mrs. Hale says yes, he didn’t drink and mostly kept his word and paid his debts, but he was a hard man and passing the day with him felt like being in the presence of a cold wind. Her eyes fall on the birdcage and she states that Minnie, no doubt, would have wanted a bird. She leans in and wonders what happened to it. She also says Minnie herself was kind of like a bird: fluttery and pretty—until she changed.
Mrs. Hale suddenly exclaimed that it would be a very nice thing for Mrs. Peters to take the quilt into Minnie. Mrs. Peters smiles and says yes, no one could object to that. She looks to the sewing basket for patches and her things. Mrs. Hale reaches in and pulls out a pretty box. She thinks of it as something Minnie would have had when she was a girl. She opens it, but she grasps her nose right away in surprise. She sees something wrapped up in a piece of silk inside.
Analysis
Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters continue to learn more about Minnie’s life, which comes to seem more and more depressing given what Mrs. Hale remembers her as twenty years prior: full of life, pretty, happy to sing in the choir and smile at everyone. Now, Minnie lives in a house out of view of the main road, has no children (which would be hard work, the women know, but would add life, color, and business), has shabby things, and, as a stand-in for so much in her life, has a bad stove.
The two women begin to notice the clues to what may have happened and why, even though their husbands had made it very clear that there were only “kitchen things” to be seen and that the women wouldn’t have the wit to see a clue if there were one. Mrs. Hale remembers how her own kitchen looked when she was interrupted and starts to see that Minnie must have also been interrupted. The sugar, the dish towel, the poorly-sewn quilt square all attest to the fact that something happened to divert Minnie’s attention.
In fact, as many critics have noted, the quilt offers an effective metaphor for how the women figure things out. Karen Alkalay-Gut writes that in “making their comprehensive patchwork quilt, [women] sort and sift through trivia and discarded material, match small scraps together, and then sew piece after piece into every enlarging squares." The women—and, by extension, the reader—look at small details and “patterns of oppositions and interrelations” to reveal “larger concepts of criminality and justice that place that murder and the significance of the sty in a different context.”
There is another layer to the quilting element of the text: the distinction between quilting and knotting. Both unite the pieces, but quilting minimizes and homogenizes the thickness; knotting, on the other hand, emphasizes the distinction between each piece by connecting the corners only. Thus, knotting creates a whole in which the individual pieces are more manifest. Alkalay-Gut explains that, at the end of the story, when the women say matter-of-factly that Minnie was going to knot her quilt, that “they have determined to differentiate between the legal definition of the crime, in which all considerations external to the act itself are meaningless and equal, and their moral definition of the crime, in which nothing is even and flat.” Furthermore, because Mrs. Hale has now worked on the quilt, it has been patchworked. It has now collective, as is the working through Minnie’s “crime” and “guilt.” Finally, the word “knotting” also connotes the knot around the neck of John Wright.
One of the other important pieces of evidence, a potent symbol for Minnie, is the birdcage with the absent bird. First, Minnie is absent as is the bird; her empty rocker alludes to her presence and the birdcage alludes to the presence of a bird. Minnie is, Alkalay-Gut notes, “herself a caged bird.” The rough way the cage’s door has been nearly torn off (and, as discussed in the next analysis, the dead bird) is suggestive of the violence, perhaps both mental and physical, that Minnie most likely faced in her home.
The bits of unearthed evidence piece together an image of Minnie’s life with John that is bleak, depressing, and devoid of care or sympathy or understanding. As Mary M. Bendel-Simso writes, “John Wright slowly strangled Minnie's spirit over the previous two decades, isolating her physically and mentally from the community of women and holding her incommunicado. In light of this spiritual homicide, he is charged with—and found guilty of—destroying his wife creatively, procreatively, and communicatively.”
