The story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) tops the list of all the classic fiction pieces I used in more than three decades of teaching in a medical school. It is vivid, accessible, and moving – and it conveys important historical messages while also holding up a mirror to current affairs and professional identity.
The Pulitzer-Prize winning-author, was inspired to write this powerful tale, following her coverage as a journalist of the 1901 trial of woman who had murdered her husband. First she wrote it as a play, “Trifles,” in which she played a role when it opened in Providence RI in 1916. The following year she adapted the play as a story. A moody thirty-minute film was produced and directed by Sally Heckel in 1980, making use of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” set to the music of the Gustav Holst. A rather blurry version can be found on youtube.
On a cold winter day, Mr. Hale has found his neighbor, Mr. Wright, strangled to death in his own home. Mrs. Minnie Wright claimed not to know who killed her husband, but she had already been arrested and was awaiting charges in jail. County Sheriff Peters brings Hale, his wife Martha Hale and his own wife Mrs. Peters to the isolated. Wright home. The two wives are to gather Minnie’s clothing and see to her preserves. The men mock women’s “trifles” and jokingly tell them not to miss any clues, before they turn to the “more serious,” manly work of finding a motive. In a basket of patches destined for a quilt, the women find a strangled canary. In quilt-like fragments, they piece together the difficult life of the absent third woman. The kitchen contains many signs of Minnie Wright’s life of abuse and violence, signs that are clearly visible to the women and ignored by the men. With silent understanding, they destroy the evidence that could incriminate her.
Considered to be one of the earliest examples of feminist literature, this story is a wonderful teaching tool. Written before women could sit on juries, it raises important issues about the discriminatory aspects of justice, the contingency of laws, and the construction of psychiatric diagnoses, especially insanity in criminal defense. Minnie’s “peers” are her female neighbours who scarcely knew her, but who easily imagine the hardship of her life and the abuse that she (and perhaps they too) suffered.
Over many years, I had the unforgettable experience of reading this story with a combined class of law students and medical students co-taught with my law-school colleague Mark Weisberg.i All the students believed that Minnie deserved to be acquitted. But their reasons differed along professional lines, and this same difference appeared every year we taught with the story.
The future lawyers wanted her to find pardon in a medicalized solution: they longed for an insanity defense in the battered wife syndrome, a diagnosis which did not become available until the 1970s.
The future doctors believed that Minnie was far from insane; her actions, they thought, were taken in reasonable self-defense; they wanted a legal fix that would change the laws to allow women to sit on juries and to recognize the harm of domestic abuse. In fact, women as jurors evolved slowly over many more years at different times and places and involved several legal cases on appeal.
The class discussion centered on why members of each group sought to preserve the rightness of their own professional canon even when they understood that the rules expressed in the story were decades out of date.
1, Mark Weisberg and Jacalyn Duffin, 1995. “Evoking the Moral Imagination: Using Stories to Teach Ethics and Professionalism to Nursing, Medical, and Law Students”; Journal of the Medical Humanities 16. 4: 247-263 Reprinted in Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27. 1: 20-27.
An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image by Brajendra Singh
