January 10, 2022
I feel that I should in all honesty begin with a disclaimer here. I am not a lawyer, and may not even think like one, however that is. I spent my career in academic medical centers, where I used a clinical model in the teaching of the art of spiritual care. I thought outside the box… A lot. But I am not a lawyer. Still, here we are, and so I proceed.
I fell in love with Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story, “A Jury of Her Peers”, the first time I read it. I was teaching high school American literature, and the March cold that seeps through every crevice in the story sounded so much like the North Dakota of my mother’s descriptions of her childhood there that I could feel it, too. The story begins as the sheriff and county attorney are going to an isolated homestead to investigate a murder. Mrs. Foster, the dead man’s wife, is being held in jail, and both men bring their wives along to gather a few things she might need. Minnie claims not to know anything about the strangulation, although she and her husband had presumably shared the bedstead where his body was found. Mystified, the men enter the house and climb the stairs to look for clues that might lead to a conviction. Meanwhile, the women notice the stark emptiness of the kitchen, and share their regret that they hadn’t reached out to Minnie in the past. They notice “things begun – – and not finished,” the table half wiped clean, the unfilled sugar bowl, the uneven stitching of one quilt square in a sewing basket. The men share a laugh “for the ways of women,” then continue their search in the barn. Meanwhile, the women speculate about Mrs. Foster’s mood, reflected in the ragged stitching of the quilt piece. They discover a birdcage with a broken door, as though it had been roughly pulled apart, and then, in the quilt square, the body of a canary, its neck broken. Without a word, they hide “the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman.”
Before her marriage to John Wright, Minnie had been sparkling and vibrant. Her husband was taciturn, severe and controlling. Today, he would be called emotionally abusive. Throughout the story, the men have little patience for the world of their wives and their “trifles.” Still, the men have the official authority; in 1917, women could not vote, run for office or sit on juries. Further, where the women mull over how life might have felt for Minnie, the men cut them short in their own emphasis on tangible clues. The details the women notice – – the rickety rocking chair, the broken stove – are given short shrift by the men, who have “a laugh for the ways of women.” “Nothing here but kitchen things,” says Sheriff Peters, “with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things,” before they move briskly “right out to the barn and get that cleared up.” Conversely, the women notice the emotional temperature of the kitchen, and so discover the clue on which the story turns.
Several years before the publication of the story, journalist Glaspell covered the trial of a woman who had murdered her husband. This story, however, is about much more than a murder. For starters, it is a story about the nature of justice, and about who gets to judge. Who are the “peers” in the story? The women, who are able to explore and grasp the many layers of the crime(s) committed, or the men, who focus on the letter of the law? It is also a story about community and empathy. The two women begin to understand the toll that abject loneliness has taken on a woman formerly known for her joyful personality, and to deeply regret their own role in that isolation. And while they may not approve of Minnie’s violent action, they are far closer to understanding it than the men, whose paternalism blinds them to the first, precipitating, death in the case as well as to clues that would explain the murder. The first death, of course, is the death of Minnie’s soul following her marriage.
This story also raises questions that we continue to struggle with today. What are the distinctions between law and justice? Glaspell would probably argue that law is an abstraction, while justice considers the flesh, the nuances around the situation. We may have gotten used to arguing the reverse. And how does community figure in the application of the law, as well as a fuller understanding of what justice would be in a particular situation?
Finally, it is noteworthy that Minnie and her husband–and the canary — are all physically absent in the story. It is the women’s intuition and imagination that provide the detail necessary for a full and accurate understanding of what happened. This leads me to reflect on the role of the artistic imagination, the spiritual, in the organization and operation of our society. It is interesting that when a country is overtaken by a repressive regime, graphic artists, writers, musicians are the first to suffer persecution, censorship and worse. I think of an older book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nafisi. New York: Random House. 2003), describing the lengths to which a group of eight women went in defiance of radical Islam in order to explore forbidden fiction during the takeover by the ayatollahs. I think of the operas of John Adams and Philip Glass that employ stories from ancient and modern history to raise questions about current politics and social values. Black visual artists like Mark Bradford and Kara Walker challenge our preconceptions about our racial geography. Who are the writers who can help us understand and deal with the politicization of our legal systems? In a happy coincidence as I was wending my way through these ideas, I listened to an interview with Laura Coates, author of Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness (New York: Simon and Schuster. 2022). Dr. Coates describes the moral dilemmas she faced in applying the law in situations where she thought she could not make allowance for nuance, where she found no “wiggle room.” That raises more interesting questions. What is the role of intuition and imagination in the healing of our democracy that seems so fragile today? Can justice and law coexist? If not, what next?
“A Jury of Her Peers” is available from a variety of sources online.
Margot Hover, D.Min., ACPE/NACC Emerita, is a retired clinical pastoral educator, having served at Duke University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Barnes Jewish Christian Medical Center in St. Louis, working in spiritual care, research, and ethics. She currently has a practice in spiritual direction.