Summary:
Discusses the story, A Jury of Her Peers, by Susan Glasspell. Summarizes the story's plot. Analyzes the character of Minnie, tracing her personality change and ultimate downfall.
John Wright has been found murdered at a farmhouse in rural Iowa in the early 1900's. Minnie Wright, John's wife, has been accused of the murder, being as she was the only person with John at the time. I feel that Minnie committed an act that was bound to happen at some point as a result of bottled up emotion placed upon her by John.
Once a very sweet and pretty woman, Minnie is now unemotional, quiet, dull, and broken in spirit. According to Mrs. Hale, we learn that John was a hard man who never let Minnie do anything. Before Minnie married John, she sang in the choir and was cheerful, fluttery, and wore pretty clothes. John abused Minnie and thus hardened her spirit. Mrs. Hale described John as a hard man, and all the other characters agreed upon the fact that John drained the cheerfulness out of everything. This concludes that John's harshness changed Minnie for the worse.
When Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters happen upon the quilt Minnie had been working on, they notice that Minnie must have been under a significant amount of stress towards the end of the project. Most of the quilt is sewn evenly, but the stitches at the end of the handiwork are rough and jagged. This indicates that Minnie was nervous for some reason when she had been finishing up her project, probably around the time she murdered her husband.
Mrs. Wright most likely did not kill John just because he killed her bird, but because she was treated as a caged bird herself. Minnie was cut off from the world and not allowed to communicate with others, almost as if she was strangled herself. When John killed Minnie's bird, it was the last straw for Minnie. John's act of cruelty not only killed the bird, but also the remains of Minnie's broken spirit. The bird was the last possession that Minnie could really call her own; once that was taken away, she lost everything. This caused Minnie to act out and seek revenge for what was right in her mind, which ended up being the murder of her husband.
John Wright's hard, cold, and rigid personality clearly changed Minnie. Although I do not agree with Minnie for murdering her husband, I believe that what she did was probably just a result from John breaking her away from her much loved life. Minnie could not take the anguish anymore and did the unthinkable by murdering her own husband.
This is the complete article, containing 413 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
