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JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE.
Term Paper ID:30495
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Essay Subject:
Examines theme of justice in Susan Glaspell's play 'TRIFLES."... More...
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7 Pages / 1575 Words
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Paper Abstract:
Examines theme of justice in Susan Glaspell's play 'TRIFLES." Action and setting of the one-act play. Plot of investigation of a farmer's murder. Wife as the husband killer. All male legal system. Theme of abused wife who kills her abusive husband and how the women of the play decide the murder was justifiable.
Paper Introduction:
This research examines the theme of justifiable homicide as the experience of finding justice in Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles. The research will set forth the pattern of ideas in the work and then discuss the means by which it illustrates the emergence of justice.
The action of Trifles takes place in the winter of 1916 and is confined to the kitchen of a farmer's wife. It takes place in the aftermath of the peculiar strangling death of the farmer. The wife of the sheriff, Mrs. Peters, and a friend of hers, Mrs. Hale, whose husband discovered the body, are gathering personal things for the farmer's wife, who is being held in jail. While Sheriff Peters, the county attorney, and Mr. Hale set about looking through the house and barn to search for evidence that might be useful in a trial, the women busy themselves in the kitch
Text of the Paper:
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What the women notice and act on illustrates their way of seeing theworld, which involves looking at the content of life experience anddiscerning the structure of the world from what that content reveals aboutit. Wright's concern that her fruit preserves might have frozen, remarksthat she'll "have something more serious than preserves to worry about"(Glaspell). Theaccretion of manifestly trivial information about what occupied Mrs. Wrightaround the house, more exactly how she was living, day to day, tells thestory of what Angel (23 ) describes as "an abused wife who kills herabusive husband." And she gets away with it. The wife of the sheriff,Mrs. Angel explains (235) that themost Mrs. Wright could credibly expect from an trial would be either amistrial based on a hung jury or jury nullification, which is a verdictthat occurs "when the law as explained to them by a trial judge does notcomport with their moral beliefs. Wright can altogether avoid trial, or if she can be somehow perceivedas having been positively justified in wringing Mr. Wright's neck, she mayjust have a chance at a decent life. Not--just that way. Off the men go to solve the mystery and nail the husband-killer, leaving Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to dispose of the ruined fruit,tidy the kitchen, and collect some personal items for Mrs. Wright. This research examines the theme of justifiable homicide as theexperience of finding justice in Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles. If, however,Mrs. 1916. From thestandpoint of dramatic action, the decision that the women make to suppressthe evidence takes the form of nullifying the case, but the actual verdictmust be seen as one of justifiable homicide. In taking a positive step outsidethe circle of the law and putting matters right, they altogether avoid thepublic humiliation of a trial, which, even if resulting in an acquittal,would never enable Mrs. Wright to reintegrate into society. That is because of what the women in thekitchen do about circumstantial evidence that doubles as proof of the crimeagainst Mrs. Wright and what the play suggests, as its main argument, isnot a crime at all but instead a case of justifiable homicide. While Sheriff Peters, the county attorney, and Mr. Hale setabout looking through the house and barn to search for evidence that mightbe useful in a trial, the women busy themselves in the kitchen. The way that the sheriff and theother men in the play think of how the world works belongs to an exercisedifferent from the way that the women think about the exact same thing. That is becauseany woman tried for murder in 1916 would face an all-male jury, i.e., onethat contained none of her peers, such as for example farmers' wives. The action of Trifles takes place in the winter of 1916 and isconfined to the kitchen of a farmer's wife. It takes place in the aftermathof the peculiar strangling death of the farmer. "Criminal Law and Women: Giving the Abused Woman Who Kills a Jury of Her Peers Who Appreciate Trifles." American Criminal Law Review 33 (Winter 1996): 229-348.Ben-Zvi, Linda. It is not quite accurate to stop at saying what is perfectly correct,that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters make a project of consciously violatingpositive law. Works CitedAngel, Marina. . Mrs. Peters's misgivings about not allowing the law to punishcrime illustrate that women are perfectly aware, thank you, ofunderstanding how men see the world. . Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters? Theirconversation as they do so reveals that the Wrights were not a happycouple; that Mrs. Minnie Wright's formerly sunny disposition as a younggirl had degenerated over the years; that Mr. Wright was "so close" thathis wife went about in shabby clothing, too embarrassed to be seen inpublic or go to practice in the church choir any more; that 3 years agoyoung Minnie Foster "used to wear pretty clothes and be lively"; that Mrs.Hale hasn't visited the cheerless Wrights, mainly because Mr. Wright was sodour (Glaspell). The theme of justifiable homicide arises in the context of the women'sdiscussion of the Wrights and their fuss and bother over the household"trifles." They begin to notice things that housewives notice all the timearound their own houses and around the houses of other housewives--howclean or out of place things are, what she was going to cook, whathousehold projects she was working on. could not vote until 192 ; and they could not serve on juries in most states until the 194 s (Angel 23 -1).While Angel may be overgeneralizing by suggesting that all women are boundto react against the legal system that they do not have access to, it isnot an overstatement to say that the specifics of evidence that emerge inthe context of the play illustrate such lack of access and make a case forthe justice of letting Mrs. Wright go free. "I sleep sound." Finding her explanation unsatisfactory, the sheriff has arrested Mrs.Wright, and the county attorney, with a sneer at the untidy kitchen and atMrs. . "I didn't wake up," Hale says Mrs. Wright explained withlittle emotion. Jurors simply acquit in spite of evidencesupporting a conviction." Whereas an all-male jury would doubtless interpret such evidence asthe strangled bird as motive for murder, not least because it would explain(in a perverse and sordid way) why Mr. Wright was strangled with a rope andnot shot with the gun that was in the house, the women in the kitchen whobecome Mrs. Wright's de facto jury interpret it differently. Peters's statement that she doesn't think of being married to the lawin the way her husband does is an important clue to the assertion ofjustifiable homicide as the real verdict. Trifles. MRS. PETERS. The men's preoccupation with solving the mystery and prosecuting thecase can be compared to an attachment to big themes, big important issuesas the dominant, public concerns of life experience. Thatis consistent with what happens in the play, but 3 years of ever-escalating mental abuse capped off by what must have been Mr. Wright'sdeliberate cruelty in strangling of Mrs. Wright's canary shows that at somepoint there must be in life what Mrs. Wright wants, too. They notice, for example, thatMrs. Itfalls to the women in the kitchen to assume the juror role, based on theiranalysis of the accumulation of the weight of evidence--household "trifles"making up every bit of it--that argue the case for the defense. Ben-Zvi(141) and Angel (252ff) both see in Trifles a portrait of oppression andabuse. From real-life, modern-day cases showing that women physicallyabused by intimates are more likely to retaliate physically, Angel infersthat Mrs. Wright's oppression involved both physical and mental abuse. Theresearch will set forth the pattern of ideas in the work and then discussthe means by which it illustrates the emergence of justice. They are at some pains to diminish theimportance of the details of life experience that hang on, or more exactlyconstitute the content of the structure. SHERIFF (chuckling). "'Murder, She Wrote': The Genesis of Susan Glaspell's Trifles." Theatre Journal 44 (May 1992): 141-4.Glaspell, Susan. Ben-Zvi (141f) characterizes whatthey notice, the minutiae of housekeeping, as circumstantial evidence, notonly of the crime of murder but also of the crime of wife abuse. Mrs. Wright cannot expect anything like that kind of verdict to issuefrom the jury that in 1916 she would be facing at trial. The point isthat they filter their perceptions through a prism of presumptions aboutthe structure of the world. The playcontinues, in a key exchange on this point: SHERIFF. The sheriff confidently, even laughingly, asserts that his wife"doesn't need supervising" while compiling things for Mrs. Wright, a linethat betrays a worldview presumptive of the fact that Everybody Knowssociety is structured in a certain way and that people behave well withinthat structure because Everybody Knows how society is structured. They deduce from the difference between Mrs. Wright's carefulquilting and the square that is stitched so badly a dramatic change in herstate of mind, just as they deduce from the broken cage and strangled birdthe fact that Mrs. Wright would not allow this final violation of her holdon beauty in life to go unanswered. They figure out, for example, that the (unseen) deputy who had earlierin the day come to light the fire in the stove could have dirtied the towelby wiping his hands on it without washing up first, and they are a littleembarrassed not to have thought of that while the men were still in thekitchen. Wright was not much of a housekeeper, that the drying towel is dirty;one can infer the presumption that a hardworking man is entitled to expecta clean towel to wash up with when he comes home. Mrs. Hale's guilty conscience about avoiding the Wright farm onaccount of its cheerlessness as a real crime against Mrs. Wright can betaken as an extenuating circumstance, or as an articulation of the contentof what is called crime in a world where justice has been denied orsuppressed. In thatregard, Angel compares the action of Trifles to that of the Antigone,wherein Antigone defies Creon's edict and gives her brother burial rites,setting up a formal dialectic between manmade and universal law. Morality as a generalcategory of experience would undoubtedly come into that picture, and it isconsistent with the notion that jury nullification (a big theoreticalcategory all its own) arises from outraged moral principle. Theinvestigation is taking place because of the odd story that the farmer'swife, Mrs. Wright, told about waking up in bed beside the body of her rope-strangled husband. But the call of justice is louder, andit is Mrs. Peters who--significantly, in what the stage directions explainmust be "in a false voice"--retreats into the male perception of women'spreoccupation with trifles in order to declare that my, my, we shouldn'tget "all stirred up over a little thing [i.e., a trifle] like a--deadcanary" (Glaspell; emphasis added). For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law. Angel'sanalysis of the fact that Glaspell rewrote the play Trifles as a shortstory titled "A Jury of Her Peers" is instructive in this regard: The story is written from the perspective of those closed out of a legal system--in this instance, women--and how they react when that legal system is about to destroy one of their own. Rather, their positive project is to subsume law that all toooften declares itself the agency of justice without having much to do withanything except the vicissitudes of legal procedure and manipulation, underthe larger and more comprehensive category of authentic justice. By hiding the evidence, theydo more than nullify, which is a negative act that ipso facto must takeplace in the context of a public trial. It may not beinaccurate to suggest that the evidence can be interpreted as the basis forjury nullification, but the trouble with that interpretation is that itwould require of the men on any trial jury to find their moral beliefsoutraged by Mr. Wright's crime on one hand, and to acknowledge moregenerally male agency in female retaliation on the other. Married to the law (Glaspell).Mrs. That was then; this is now, and Mrs. Wright waits in jailto see whether she will be charged. Women did not make homicide law as it existed in 1916: they . Behind the mask of everyday trifles,the jury of Mrs. Wright's peers exposes the ethical triviality of law,which, anchored in its self-sustaining rules, too rarely reaches themandates of justice. Peters, and a friend of hers, Mrs. Hale, whose husband discovered thebody, are gathering personal things for the farmer's wife, who is beingheld in jail.
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