"A Jury of Her Peers"

"A Jury of Her Peers"
Susan Glaspell

As the reader discovers early on in this short story, Mrs. Wright killed her husband. The question of the story is 'What provoked her to kill her husband'? As the men of the story search for this motive, the anticipation of the discovery creates suspense for the reader. Ironically, the Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, who the men viewed as inferior, found clues that piece together to form Mrs. Wright's motive. As the two women wait for their husbands to find clues to the mystery, the ladies wait in Mrs. Wright's house and begin to straighten up the kitchen. In doing this, the women stumble upon some interesting objects such as the bird cage without a bird, a pristine quilt with only a few patches sewn frantically, and half a bag of sugar transferred from the bag. These first few discoveries cause the women to suspicion that something made Mrs. Wright stop in the middle of her work and also made her nervous. However, the women never said aloud that Mrs. Wright killed her husband. Later the women also discover the use of the birdcage by finding a dead bird among Mrs. Wright's sewing materials. The bird's neck had been wrung, and with this information the suspense grew because now the women knew that the death of this bird, possibly Mrs. Wright's only companion, caused her to kill her husband because he had wrung its neck.  The women empathized with Mrs. Wright and her loneliness. They decided that she should not be found guilty for her actions, so they decided to take the bird and conceal it. "Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out...and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen" (Glaspell). The ladies were the jury for Mrs. Wright because they decided on her innocence and concealed the only clue to Mrs. Wright's motive.