Legal and Moral Justification for Homicide in Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”

I. Genesis of the Narrative: The Hossack Case

Glaspell’s impetus to write “A Jury of Her Peers” came from the sensational murder trial of Iowa housewife Margaret Hossack. Glaspell had covered the trial as a young newspaper reporter for the Des Moines Daily News in 1900 and 1901. I posit that a legal reading of Glaspell’s narrative builds upon the historical perspective of her newspaper coverage of the Hossack case.

In 1901, Margaret Hossack, an abused wife, was found guilty of murdering her husband. ⁷ At that time, the only available “justice” was dispensed by men, who controlled and represented the law. ⁸ Domestic abuse was an accepted form of spousal control in the privacy of the home. Neither the defense nor the prosecution in the Hossack case offered a complete or accurate picture of the dilemmas faced by Margaret Hossack. ⁹ In fact, during the trial, the defense attempted to portray the Hossack marriage as a happy one, because evidence of abuse would only have provided motive for murder. ¹⁰

Susan Glaspell covered the Hossack trial in depth, writing over twenty newspaper pieces on the case. While Glaspell’s attitude in her articles was at first hostile to Margaret Hossack, once she visited the Hossack home and saw the circumstances of Mrs. Hossack’s life, she began to portray the defendant much more sympathetically. ¹¹ The fictional narrative provided an opportunity for Glaspell to be a voice for the women who had silently attended the Hossack trial and were unable to do anything about the injustice involved. ¹²

There are a number of significant changes from the real-life Hossack case to the fictional narrative in “A Jury of Her Peers.” The setting for Glaspell’s narrative is the home where the murder took place, rather than a court of law; however, the kitchen in the story becomes a de facto court of justice. While the real life Margaret Hossack had nine children, her fictional equivalent, Minnie Wright, the accused widow in the narrative, is childless and her life is all the more lonesome and isolated. While there is evidence that the real life husband, John Hossack was physically abusive to his wife, there are indirect suggestions of psychological and possible physical abuse by John Wright, the murdered husband in the fictional work. While the murder weapon in the Hossack case was an axe, that weapon appears in “A Jury of Her Peers” only in the recollections of Mrs. Peters, the fictional sheriff’s wife, about the cruelty of a boy who killed her kitten with a hatchet and her reaction that “‘if they hadn’t held me back I would have . . . hurt him’” (474). By contrast, Glaspell, in the fictional narrative, uses a rope as the weapon that killed John Wright. Mary Bendel-Simso, in her article, suggests that this change of weapon – from axe to rope – converts Mrs. Wright from “murderer” to “executioner”; “like the hangman, she cannot be guilty, for she is merely the arm of justice.” ¹³ Thus, consideration of the actions of Mrs. Wright requires us to re-evaluate our notions of morality and justice.

II. Perspectives on the Narrative: Quilting a Life

Susan Glaspell’s work exposed the injustices of the institutionalized patriarchal American legal system, thereby contributing to increasing public awareness of those injustices. Glaspell’s fictional story is set in the early 1900s. Minnie Foster Wright has been arrested, accused of murdering her husband John Wright by strangling him with a rope as he lay asleep in bed at their rural Midwestern farm. Mr. Wright and Mrs. Wright are seen solely through the descriptions of others. Sheriff Peters and county attorney Henderson come to the Wright farm looking for evidence of motive. The sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, has accompanied her husband to gather some possessions for the already jailed Mrs. Wright. Mr. Hale, the neighboring farmer has been asked to provide information about his having found the body of John Wright. Martha Hale, the farmer’s wife, has come to the Wright home because the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, is feeling apprehensive and has requested that another woman accompany her. After everyone arrives at the Wright home, the wives of the sheriff and the farmer – Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale – are relegated to the kitchen by the men. The men are dismissive of the women, trivializing them and their concerns. As Mr. Peters remarks, “‘women are used to worrying over trifles’” (464). ¹⁴ Mrs. Peters notes that “‘Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger – or sudden feeling’” (468). In fact, the women find evidence indicative of spousal abuse by Mr. Wright against Mrs. Wright. The culmination of their discoveries is a pretty box; inside the box they find a carefully wrapped dead canary whose neck has been wrung. The women infer that Mrs. Wright killed her husband just as he had killed the bird; this would provide a motive for the murder. They silently band together and hide the evidence. In doing so, they effectively prevent Mrs. Wright from ever coming to trial because an essential element, motive, cannot be found.

Linda Ben-Zvi, in her article, proposes that, since Minnie Wright is not present in the narrative, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters “like quilters, patch together the scenarios of her life and her guilt.” ¹⁵ In the patriarchal society of the early 1900s, quilting provided a way for women to communicate and express themselves. ¹⁶ Images of quilting abound in the story. The women encounter the blocks of the quilt that Minnie Wright had been sewing. The stitches are all neat except for one section, which is sewn very poorly; this leads the women to question what might have upset Mrs. Wright so badly so as to cause her to lose her grip. Martha Hale reads the quilt as a form of communication: “Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her” (471). The women debate which stitch Mrs. Wright was using, quilting or knotting. Quilting is a slower process that requires consistent sewing which evens out thickness, while knotting is only at the ends and provides quicker and uneven results emphasizing the distinctions. The knotting stitch also emphasizes Mrs. Wright’s isolation, since “quilting work on an entire blanket would have been too arduous for one person.” ¹⁷ The men laugh at the women’s musings over the stitches. “‘We think,’ began the sheriff’s wife in a flurried voice, ‘that she was going to – knot it’” (474). Critics have pointed to multiple meanings of the phrase “knot it,” including the literal reference to the form of the quilting stitch as well as the knot in the rope that was used to kill John Wright. There is the reference to the homonym “not it” as the women affirm that there is not a possibility of justice under the law for Minnie Wright. The women also knot themselves together in silent refusal, not sharing what they know with the males who represent the law. ¹⁸

III. The Jury in the Narrative: What Constitutes a Jury of One’s Peers?

The guarantee to a right to trial by a jury of one’s peers can be traced back to England, where, through the Magna Carta of 1215, a group of barons, seeking to limit the King’s power over them, demanded that their “peers,” rather than the king, should hear charges against them. ¹⁹ The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right to “an impartial jury.” ²⁰ This is commonly understood to be a jury of one’s peers. Blackstone’s 18th century definition of a jury as “twelve free and lawful men” was still valid in 1917, when Glaspell wrote “A Jury of Her Peers.” ²¹ In her article, Patricia L. Bryan questions “whether the men, with their preconceived assumptions and biases, are capable of doing justice in the case of Minnie Wright and whether the law, as it developed, ever took into account experiences such as hers.” ²²

I suggest that, in Glaspell’s fictional narrative, there are two metaphorical juries operating in the Wright home at the same time, a male jury and a female jury. Both engage in fact-finding using their own methods, coming from their own frames of reference. The male jury represents the law of the time, following prescribed mechanistic and legalistic methods to unearth a motive to convict Minnie Foster Wright. The female jury, representing morality and justice, is attuned to a sense of community and an understanding of people. The women are sensitive to the isolation and abuse experienced by women at the hands of men. The female jury represents the silent voices of women who could not serve on juries in 1917 and whose ideas were silenced by the legal and social structure of the day. Suzy Clarkson Holstein distinguishes between two kinds of silence of the women in the story. Initially there is a silence of powerlessness – speechlessness – when confronted by the men; by contrast, the women’s concealment of the evidence of motive in “their final refusal to speak rings with the power of intention and choice.” ²³ It is this female jury which is able to unearth the truth and provide its own form of justice for Minnie Wright. ²⁴ As Mrs. Hale says to Mrs. Peters: “We all go through the same things–its [sic it’s] all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren’t–why do you and I understand? Why do we know–what we know this minute?” (476).

Orit Kamir affirms that “the law plays a crucial part in the awakening and transformation of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, both as the vehicle of male oppression and in providing a responsively female culture.” ²⁵ Kamir terms this a “community of women” who conduct their own “alternative legal process,” valuing the trifles that the men discard as irrelevant. ²⁶ I argue that the dichotomy in the story is not simply between men and women but more specifically between empowered men and disempowered, voiceless women. It is the narrow legalistic focus of the men which causes them to miss the clues that a wider consideration – the inclusion of the women’s perspectives – could have revealed to them. Thus, the men and the women exhibit different perspectives, priorities and concerns, leading to different results. ²⁷

It was not until the 1970s that the law would regulate the private world of the home. ²⁸ Marina Angel concludes that “as a result, abuse in the personal, private sphere was left to the inequitable physical, economic and political realities of women’s lives.” ²⁹ I argue that Glaspell was an agent for change, whose work exposed the injustice of the institutionalized legal inequality of women, thereby eventually contributing to the prospect of justice through the legal system.

IV. Legal Justification: The Battered Woman and Psychological Abuse

The legal injustices exposed by Glaspell’s narrative contributed to the change in the legal system that eventually recognized Battered Woman’s Syndrome as a legal excuse or justification for homicide, based upon domestic violence provoked by physical and emotional spousal abuse. State v. Kelly, the landmark 1984 New Jersey Supreme Court case that recognized Battered Woman’s Syndrome (BWS), was particularly important in acknowledging the need for testimony by an expert to determine the honesty and reasonableness of a defendant’s belief that her life was in imminent danger. Kelly, citing the work of psychologist Lenore E. Walker, provides a definition of the battered woman as “one who is repeatedly subjected to any forceful physical or psychological behavior by a man in order to coerce her to do something he wants her to do without concern for her rights.” ³⁰ The court in Kelly states that “the combination of all these symptoms – resulting from sustained psychological and physical trauma compounded by aggravating social and economic factors – constitutes the battered-woman’s syndrome.” ³¹ The court further relies upon psychologist Walker’s work as it describes a propensity in many battered women to “become so demoralized and degraded by the fact that they cannot predict or control the violence that they sink into a state of psychological paralysis and become unable to take any action at all to improve or alter the situation.” ³² The court in Kelly affirms that understanding the “unique pressures” experienced by a battered woman is essential to comprehension of her state of mind. ³³

The signs of abuse in “A Jury of Her Peers” are pieced together through the understandings of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, in the kitchen of the Wright home, the venue of Mrs. Wright’s isolation under the control of her spouse, John Wright. Martha Hale recalls the Minnie Foster of twenty years earlier as “‘one of the town girls, singing in the choir’” (467). That girl was joyful and carefree in contrast to the Minnie Wright of the present day, whose shabby clothes and dingy broken rocker reflect her broken and battered life. The Wrights had a bad stove with a broken lining, a reflection of the lack of warmth in the home and the lack of sustenance provided by Mr. Wright. Veronica Makowsky identifies the image of Minnie Wright as the caged bird over whom John Wright exercises complete control, including his damage to the domestic sphere. ³⁴ John Wright isolated and oppressed his wife with economic and emotional domination. ³⁵ Minnie Wright, constrained by her husband and the society of her time, was unable to reach out for help. ³⁶

There are clues to the circumstance that something caused a sudden change in Mrs. Wright, which only the women, attuned to the fiber of the life of one of their peers, can discern. ³⁷ Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are disturbed by the half-done tasks in Minnie Wright’s kitchen: a bag of sugar half empty beside the bucket of sugar (466), a table wiped half clean (468), signs of “things begun – and not finished” (468). Examining one piece of Minnie Wright’s quilting “‘it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about!’” (470). “‘What do you suppose she was so – nervous about?’” (470). Something very troubling had happened to interrupt Mrs. Wright’s routine. Kathy Newman finds that the repeated invocation of Minnie’s maiden name, Foster, even though she has been Minnie Wright for twenty years, is a reminder that the woman she had been as Minnie Foster, “had been smothered and silenced by Wright. And these women knew that this part of Minnie’s Self would be unseen and unheard by the law courts of the men – the patriarchal system.” ³⁸ In a broader sense, half-done tasks signify a society where women are isolated and disempowered. ³⁹

The image of the woman whose husband shut her off from the outside world and confined her to a dreary, lonely, childless, prison-like home resonates with Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. The indications of abuse become more conspicuous as the story progresses. The women find a bird cage with its door torn off: “‘Looks as if some one must have been – rough with it’” (471). They reflect on how difficult it was to spend time with John Wright. Mrs. Hale describes him as “‘a hard man . . . Just to pass the time of day with him . . . like a raw wind that gets to the bone’” (472). They realize that Mrs. Wright’s isolated and childless situation would have caused her to want a bird: “‘it’s a lonesome place, and always was’” (472). Soon they find the dead bird in the sewing basket and Mrs. Peters exclaims: “‘Somebody wrung its neck’” (473). The women’s eyes meet, and they make the connections between the broken door of the bird cage, the dead canary and the dead man whose neck was broken by a rope. I argue that the women realize that something snapped in Minnie Foster Wright when the bird was killed, and that she killed her husband, triggered by his violent action in killing the canary and killing her spirit. In 1917, there was no vocabulary to describe her experiences. ⁴⁰ Today we can articulate what the women could only surmise: that Mrs. Wright, as a battered woman, was terrified that she might be next after the torn cage door and the bird. Since Mrs. Wright killed her husband while he lay sleeping, I suggest that an understanding of BWS is necessary to appreciate her perception of imminent danger. ⁴¹

The characteristics of battered women have been likened to individuals suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the description of Mrs. Wright subsequent to the homicide supports this categorization. ⁴² Mr. Hale found Mrs. Wright looking “‘queer”’ (461), dull and dazed “‘as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next’” (462). When Mr. Hale asked why he could not see Mr. Wright, Mrs. Wright replied: “‘Cause he’s dead,’ says she, just as quiet and dull – and fell to pleatin’ her apron’” (462). Mrs. Wright’s state is catatonic: unresponsive, withdrawn and rigid. I suggest that Glaspell’s narrative contributed to increasing public awareness which, in recent decades, has recognized that a battered woman reasonably reacts differently to perceived threats of imminent danger. ⁴³

Current law recognizes BWS and allows its use under certain circumstances as an excuse or a justification in homicide cases. Marina Angel distinguishes between excuse and justification: “An excuse, such as insanity, finds that there is something so wrong with an individual, that the individual cannot be held criminally liable. . . . A justification, on the other hand, such as self-defense, looks to the circumstances surrounding a killing and finds that an act that would otherwise be murder is not morally blameworthy and therefore is not criminal.” ⁴⁴ John Wright’s provocations provide a possible justification for Minnie Wright. Angel posits that abused women kill primarily out of fear, rather than anger. Thus, self-defense may not manifest immediately, but rather may extend over a period of time.” ⁴⁵ Yet even under current BWS laws, only a physical attack on Mrs. Wright that was proximate in time to the killing of her husband would allow the homicide to be characterized as justifiable. ⁴⁶

The theory of “learned helplessness,” applied by Walker and other psychologists to battered women, ⁴⁷ allowed for a defense of temporary insanity or diminished capacity, because it was based upon the supposition that there were psychological deficiencies in the abused woman. ⁴⁸ This was an excuse rather than a justification for homicide. The stereotypical descriptions of the battered woman’s incapacity created a picture of helplessness that frustrated claims of justifiable self-defense, leaving only the excuse of diminished capacity or insanity. The necessity of battered women who killed their abusers to resort to claiming “one of the various impaired mental states” was the norm until the courts began to permit the introduction of expert testimony on BWS in the mid-1970s. ⁴⁹ Since that time, other authors have found that justification, which would constitute a complete defense leading to exoneration in BWS homicide cases, is more accurate than an excuse defense. According to Angel, such “experts contend that abused women who kill may be acting reasonably in their assessments of both the severity of the harm they face and its immediacy, which should lead to verdicts of not guilty based on a reasonable need for self-defense.” ⁵⁰ I posit that the battered woman’s perception of reasonableness is necessary to contextualize her perception of imminent threat, which allows for the complete defense of justification.

Beyond physical abuse, I argue that psychological abuse can cause the fear of imminent life-threatening harm, and that such fear can build to a breaking point, like the break in the bird’s neck that occurred in “A Jury of Her Peers.” In considering a defense based upon purely psychological abuse as a justification in BWS homicide cases, my argument goes beyond the current state of the law of domestic violence. Charles Patrick Ewing proposes that the existing law of self-defense for battered women who kill should be expanded to include “psychological self-defense,” in contrast to current law, which requires a physical attack as the immediate provocation for self-defense. ⁵¹ According to Ewing, in the majority of BWS cases, the women do not kill their abusers at the moment of direct conflict. Rather, most of the killings occur while the woman is not directly threatened, such as when the batterer is asleep, as we find in “A Jury of Her Peers.” ⁵² Moreover, Ewing suggests that the current law of self-defense is restrictive with regard to battered women because of its definition of “self” as limited to “physical life and bodily integrity,” whereas “self” is commonly understood as encompassing not only physical life but also psychological dimensions such as “security, autonomy, identity, consciousness, and spirituality.” ⁵³ Ewing theorizes that, if the law of self-defense were to include a broader definition of “self,” then injury to the psychological “self” would become relevant to the legal criteria of self-defense and would, in turn, provide women who kill their abusers outside of “direct confrontations” with a legitimate way of using the self-defense claim as a justification. ⁵⁴

Ewing asserts that battered women do not recognize any way to escape from their situation and they face the “choice of killing (either the batterers or themselves) or being reduced to a psychological state in which their continued physical existence will have little if any meaning or value . . . a life hardly worth living.” ⁵⁵ Ewing notes that “many, perhaps most, battered women who kill their batterers do so in psychological self-defense – that is, to protect themselves from being destroyed psychologically – and that under certain circumstances the law should recognize psychological self-defense as a justification for the use of deadly force.” ⁵⁶ Yet, even Ewing requires a battery or threat of imminent battery as a triggering event. ⁵⁷ In contrast to Ewing, Robin West underscores a more overarching sense of psychological abuse, as a function of the patriarchal structure of the family and legal institutions. ⁵⁸ I argue that the literary portrayal of justice in “A Jury of Her Peers” goes beyond current law to anticipate purely psychological self-defense. Mrs. Wright’s fear created the imminent danger that justified the homicide in the eyes of Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, the jury of her peers. As in tort law, where the trend is toward recognition of emotional distress without the need to prove physical injury, so in BWS Glaspell is an agent for change, depicting a situation where purely psychological trauma can possibly cause a woman to kill.

V. Moral Justification: The Power of Jury Nullification

Jury nullification represents the possibility of justice beyond the law, a moral judgment not to convict a clearly guilty defendant in spite of the law, because the law cannot in good conscience be followed. ⁵⁹ I will establish how Glaspell gives us a fictional window into the possibilities of morality-based justice based upon jury nullification engineered by disempowered women who perceive that one of their own is a victim of domestic abuse. In commenting on the relationships among morality, politics and law, Austin Sarat posits that “law respects, or should respect, the claims of individual conscience, and that it should permit, if not encourage, individuals to escape its constraints when [legal] rules conflict with conscience.” ⁶⁰ In Glaspell’s story, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, ineligible to serve on a jury in Iowa in 1917, fashion an alternative system, constituting themselves a jury of the peers of Minnie Foster Wright. ⁶¹ They engage in jury nullification, to all intents and purposes carrying out what Vidmar and Hans term a “vote to acquit even though they understand that the defendant is guilty under the law and the facts.” ⁶²

Jury nullification is recognized as an inherent power of the jury. ⁶³ I posit that Alan Scheflin’s description of jury nullification is applicable to “A Jury of Her Peers”:

Inherent in the concept of a lay jury composed of citizens who leave their normal life patterns, meld into a decision-making unit for the purposes of judging one of their number, and melt back into the community, is the ability to say no and the knowledge that it cannot be held against them. The jury serves as an ameliorating force tempering the rigidity of the law, and of the professionals who administer it, with the common sense realities of the community. ⁶⁴

As suggested by Scheflin and Van Dyke, “jury mercy” is a more apt term than “jury nullification,” since jurors are not acting in an extra-legal capacity, but rather “serving the unique and vital function of smoothing the friction between law and justice, and between the people and their laws.” ⁶⁵ I argue that it is that quality of mercy which is exercised by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. ⁶⁶

Scheflin traces the historical development of jury nullification, noting in particular the seminal case of John Peter Zenger, the famous eighteenth-century newspaper publisher. In 1735, Zenger had been charged with publishing seditious materials in his New York newspaper, which had not been authorized by the British mayor. Zenger’s attorney, Alexander Hamilton, urged the jury “‘to see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, and to make use of their consciences and understanding in judging the lives, liberties or estate of their fellow subjects.’” ⁶⁷ The jury found Zenger not guilty, even though the law at the time, if followed, required a conviction. Jury nullification is a mechanism to guarantee the fairness of the legal process by assuring that jurors are not forced to compromise their conscience or their sense of morality. ⁶⁸

I posit that it is a moral sense of justice that motivated and justified the obviously illegal acts committed by Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale in “A Jury of Her Peers.” There is no doubt of Minnie Foster Wright’s guilt. Rather, what we witness is the evolution in the thinking and bonding of the two women who form a jury that nullifies the possibility of a guilty verdict. Without the evidence that the women alter, destroy, or hide, no motive will be found. And without a motive, the authorities cannot bring Minnie Wright to trial. As Ben-Zvi demonstrates, Glaspell makes one of the first modern arguments for justifiable homicide in the cases of Margaret Hossack and Minnie Foster Wright, both disempowered and disenfranchised females: “Instead of arguing their innocence, Glaspell concretizes the conditions under which these women live and the circumstances that might cause them to kill.” ⁶⁹ Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters understand Minnie Foster Wright’s life and how her experiences have shaped her perception of imminent danger.

Bendel-Simso states that justice can be served only by protecting Minnie Foster from the law. ⁷⁰ The law would have undoubtedly convicted her, with the abuse that she suffered as critical evidence against her. As Mrs. Hale says: “‘The law is the law – and a bad stove is a bad stove’” (469). Just as John Wright left his wife with a bad stove, the justice system would leave her with its unjust results. Applying the reasoning of Horowitz, Kerr and Niedermeier in their study of the psychological and legal dimensions of jury nullification, the women in Glaspell’s story may also infer that Minnie Wright has “already suffered enough.” ⁷¹ The women have intuitive expertise beyond the knowledge of the all-male juries of the day.

The jury that is able to effectively engage in nullification in the story consists of two very different women. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are not from the same social class, as evidenced by their distinct attire and speech. ⁷² Yet gender transcends class in this situation. When Mrs. Hale’s husband comments that “‘women are used to worrying over trifles,’ the two women moved a little closer together” (464). The women bond through the process of discovery of the crime and self-discovery. “Their eyes met – something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other” (470). Kamir aptly likens Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to conscientious objectors, who will not obey immoral laws but who do so privately, not as advocates for changing the legal system. ⁷³ According to Leonard Mustazza, much of the progression in the judgment by the women “is due to Mrs. Hale’s ability to persuade her peer to regard the case from her perspective.” ⁷⁴ Thus, it is Mrs. Hale who takes the lead in their deliberations.

Mrs. Hale is the plain-spoken wife of a farmer. She begins to believe that her own abandonment of Minnie Foster Wright was the real crime: “‘I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here . . . but it’s a lonesome place. . . . I can see now”’ (472). Mrs. Hale indicts herself: “The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear. ‘Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!’ she cried. ‘That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?’ . . . ‘I might ’a’ known she needed help!”’ (475). The nature of the crime is transformed as Mrs. Hale takes on a sense of guilt. And this informs her participation as a member of the jury of Minnie Foster Wright’s peers.

In contrast to Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters, the wife of the sheriff, is described by the county attorney as being “‘married to the law’” (477), but she transcends her attachment to the law through her association with Mrs. Hale as the story progresses. “That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff’s wife now” (469). Finding the dead canary buried in a pretty box in Minnie Wright’s sewing basket causes Mrs. Peters to recall the violent killing of her kitten by a boy with a hatchet. After the recollection, the women bonded, as “they sat without speaking or moving” (474). Yet, in her role as the sheriff’s wife, she feels the need to rationalize the significance of the discovery of the bird: “‘it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a – dead canary. . . . As if that could have anything to do with – with – My wouldn’t they laugh?’” (476). Mrs. Peters is acutely aware of the conflict between being married to the law and serving on the jury of Minnie Wright’s peers.

The women tamper with evidence in a crescendo of illegal acts. They redo Minnie Wright’s erratic quilting. They lie to the county attorney, saying that the cat had gotten the bird that was missing from the bird cage, and that the cat, being superstitious, had left. They come to realize that Minnie Wright killed her husband. “And then again the eyes of the two women met – this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met” (473–4). Mrs. Hale says: “‘No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird,’ she said after that – ‘a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too’” (475). Finally, they hide the dead bird, “the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman – that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through the hour” (477). ⁷⁵ As Angel affirms, by this means, “Susan Glaspell’s women engaged in jury nullification by making a trial of Minnie Foster Wright impossible.” ⁷⁶

The women, through their own understandings, through their oblique communications, and through their silences, find that Minnie Foster Wright is a victim who is not culpable despite what the law might say. ⁷⁷ As Bendel-Simso suggests, the crime is “spiritual homicide” and John Wright is found guilty of “destroying his wife creatively, procreatively, and communicatively.” ⁷⁸ Minnie Wright is thus transformed into the “arm of justice”; she is thereby vindicated in killing her husband. ⁷⁹

Empathy is the key to understanding how the women of the story serve as a jury of Minnie Foster Wright’s peers. Sharon Krause argues persuasively that empathy plays an important role in jury deliberations. Krause defines empathy as “the affective-cognitive communication of sentiments between persons that transpires through perspective-taking.” ⁸⁰ Krause cites examples where the law itself is flawed and thereby unjust. ⁸¹ She concludes that, for empathy to be cultivated among juries, “marginalized and minority voices within the society must be heard regularly in public debate, that they be protected by a system of civil and political rights that gives others (including government officials) an incentive to take them seriously, and that they be well represented in the jury room.” ⁸²

Through the use of empathy, Glaspell has created a vehicle for marginalized outsiders who recognize the futility of relying upon a jury system that does not include or recognize them. The women in the story did not know each other before they met at the Wright home, the scene of the crime(s). Neither woman arrived with a pre-planned desire to subvert the law. It was their experiences of empathy with the life and experiences of the accused, Minnie Foster Wright, that led them to pay attention to evidence that was trivialized by their male counterparts who were following the law. Their actions in tampering with and hiding evidence were acts revealing their understanding of how Mrs. Wright could have snapped, just as the bird’s neck was snapped. Newman points out that Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale commit the “act of daring to be present to Minnie Foster, and to each other. . . . Women daring to do justice to one another is an act of ordinary heroism, perhaps the supremely trivial act in patriarchy.” ⁸³ I therefore submit that Glaspell is an agent for change, who, through the vehicle of jury nullification, gives us a fictional window into the possibilities of moral justice exercised by disempowered women.

VI. Conclusion

In conclusion, I submit that Susan Glaspell was an agent for change, whose work dramatically exposed the injustice of the institutionalized inequality of women and, eventually, contributed to the acknowledgment of equal justice for women in our legal system. An interdisciplinary studies (IDS) approach demonstrates how an author can be an agent for change and how literature can presage the law. It dramatizes and thereby facilitates a full understanding of the conflicts between legal justice and moral justice. It is an example of how life can, and often does, follow art, and how life can change as a result of art exposing injustice in life that might otherwise go unseen. In their “emerging consensus” definition of interdisciplinary studies, Julie Klein and William Newell define IDS as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession . . . . IDS draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective.” ⁸⁴

In “A Jury of Her Peers,” the perspective of law, as represented by the men in the story and the law in effect in 1917, would have undoubtedly produced a guilty verdict, had Minnie Foster Wright gone to trial. As seen in the Hossack case, which was the inspiration for the story, domestic abuse would only have provided motive for the crime. It is through the perspective of psychology, in “A Jury of Her Peers,” that we appreciate how Susan Glaspell contributes to and helps to develop increasing public awareness of not only the recognition of the effects of domestic abuse but also the validity of psychological abuse in explaining the breaking point of a battered wife. The moral justification for the homicide undoubtedly committed by Minnie Foster Wright is captured in and through jury nullification by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. The women are able to empathize, and to create a situation where we as readers can empathize, by filling the silence surrounding domestic violence with the details of Minnie Foster Wright’s life.

I submit that, through the integration of the different disciplinary lenses, we are able to fully appreciate how Glaspell reflects and dramatizes the unjust treatment of abused women in our legal system at the turn of the century. Through the story, Glaspell is able to expose this injustice to the broader population, thereby gaining legal recognition of the injustice and eventual support for its change. Glaspell not only presaged the current state of the law of domestic abuse and jury nullification but her narrative also goes beyond the current state of the law, even today, and in this way continues to be an agent for change and a voice of social consciousness.

In contemplating the relationship between morality and legality, Sarat raises the issue of “the blurring of boundaries that arises in the very attempt to separate the two.” ⁸⁵ Susan Glaspell’s narrative evokes this dilemma of a situation where it is necessary for the female jury of Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale to act illegally in order for justice to be done. In accordance with the metaphor in the fictional narrative, both “A Jury of Her Peers” and this article may be viewed as quilts. We weave the results with the solidity of the quilt that Minnie Foster Wright could not “quilt” when she “knotted,” thereby comprehending the legal and moral justification for homicide by an abused woman.