Reader's Response - "A Jury of Her Peers"

Feminine Trifles. The Construction of Gender Roles in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and in Modern English and American Crime Stories. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, 2008.

This essay uses theories of narrative to examine how Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations reflect and resist the ability of narratives to construct identities, create moral meanings, and impose truths. It also explores the dramatisation of experiential knowledge as a means of building communities. Blood Relations' meta-theatrical self-consciousness, resistance to moral meaning through a refusal of narrative closure, and ambivalence towards the representative nature of personal experiences, in contrast to Trifles' naturalism, narrative conclusion, and confidence in the assumption of shared women's experiences reflect changes in feminisms, theoretical understandings of experiential knowledge, and strategies for the stage representation of women. L'essai fait appel aux théories de la narration pour examiner comment Trifles (Susan Glaspell) et Blood Relations (Sharon Pollock) correspondent aux capacités de la narration et y résistent à la fois en vue de construire des identités, créer des sens moraux et imposer des vérités. Il examine également la dramatisation de la connaissance expérientielle comme moyen de construction des communautés. La conscience de soi méta théâtrale faisant partie de Blood Relations, la résistance à la signification morale par le refus d'une fermeture sur le plan narratif et l'ambivalence à l'égard de l'aspect représentatif des expériences personnelles contrastent avec le naturalisme que propose Trifles, sa conclusion narrative et la confiance en la supposition voulant que les expériences partagées par les femmes correspondent aux changements du féminisme, aux compréhensions théoriques de la connaissance expérientielle et aux stratégies de représentation sur scène de la femme.

Law & Literature, Vol. 19 No.3. 358-376, 2007

In Susan Glaspell's Jury of Her Peers, women's awakening, their feminine bonding, and ideological activism are inseparable from their realization of the gender discrimination and oppression inherent in the existing legal system, and their responsive creation of alternative, feminine justice and judgment. The search for feminist consciousness and the foundation of an informed community of women imply rejection of the legal order as a tool of patriarchal domination, and exploration of feminine legal thought. I suggest that in her  short story, Glaspell anticipates both legal feminist theory that focuses on dominance, oppression, and resistance, 2 and psychological feminist theory that focuses on an ethics of care, women's voice, and feminine networking. 3 Further, her narrative offers a uniquely coherent, comprehensive world-view, combining the two perspectives, often perceived as contrasting. Quilting serves as a three-dimensional metaphor for feminine social networking, feminist storytelling, and women's engagement in law (their unique method of piecing evidence together). Quilting thus symbolically mediates between the fundamental structures of feminine community, feminist literature, and feminist legal thought. Introducing jurisprudential rhetoric, I go on to show how Glaspell's literary quilting of feminine communality and feminist legal thinking represents an episode of emerging feminist consciousness as an act of collective "conscientious objection"-if not potential revolution. My essay concludes with the suggestion, based on personal teaching experience, to include Jury in law-school curriculum, together with contemporary feminist films. Significant issues and motifs link Glaspell's short story (and play) with contemporary feminist film. Read with Glaspell's text, feminist films can be seen as modern, influential remakes of her turn-of-the-century work. Such films, as well as their literary predecessor, are powerful teaching materials in twenty-first-century law school curriculum.

A study of women's rights in early 20th century America from legal, societal, and cultural perspectives based on how these issues are presented in two of the creative works of Susan Glaspell.

2000, 22 Studies in Law, Politics & Society, 103-129

2003

This article presents information on the book "A Jury of Her Peers." As noted by several scholars, this book is very much about the practice of exegesis, about seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else. It is treated as a kind of informal exegetical work, a casual forensics, necessary to the formation of collective memory. Consider that the evidence of memory is always with us, it is always right here in our hands, before our eyes, in our thoughts as we scrutinize its contours. Yet from a simultaneity of evidence and perception comes a rift through which other times enter and dwell in the present. Our remembrance reconstructs the past through the close scrutiny of gesture, objects, words, images, forms and symbols from which we create the productive intrusions of memory. First a landscape of communication is formed from the relation of past and present. Remembrance creates a cultural topography on which we locate our actions. This book is not witnessing to domestic violence.

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the pioneering American female playwrights who evolved into visibility at the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the twentieth. She had celebrated in her personal and literary life the advent of the new woman striving to fulfill her dreams in a hostile and intensive world. Glaspell based her first dramatic play, Trifles, on an actual murder case she covered while working as a journalist.

-Women in the Victorian novel were be littled and were portrayed as a kind of entertainment to man -they were reflected as an attachment to men ‫ــ‬ and all what they hope in their lives is to get married to rich man. -Women were portrayed as nothing even the writers of the works were women. The first woman who changed in the 20 th century Virginia Woolf who started new tradition in the feministic writing supported dignity and supported the existence of woman as a man in equal. -Two ages of anti-feminism: Romanticism and Victorian Ages.

On Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers”: Centennial Essays, Interviews and Adaptations. Eds. Martha Carpentier and Emeline Jouve. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 62-78

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles raises a number of questions on the nature of justice, whether it is relative or absolute, as well as questions of the nature of gender roles. One cannot help but see that the characters of the play have deeply ingrained ideas about their gender roles, nor can one ignore the fact that true justice appears to be had in the end only by breaking the established rules of law and order. While on the surface it appears that the story seems to support