From the Play to the Story: Writers and Readers of A Jury of Her Peers

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study Susan Glaspell’s story A Jury of Her Peers from the perspective of the reader-response criticism which emphasizes the significance of the readers as active participants in reading and evaluating a text. In this criticism, the active reader is endowed with the responsibility of generating a message or a meaning from the text. A Jury of Her Peers offers a meta-text of a murder mystery waiting to be solved by its active readers. The absent voice of the story Minnie Wright is suspected of being the murderer of his husband while she leaves behind a series of clues which have to be read as hidden texts with their hidden messages, leading their readers to the motives behind the murder case. As the text is read both by male and female characters/readers in relation with their gender roles, a feminist perspective adds a further connotation to the reader-response criticism of the text. Since male characters evaluate the situation with their prejudices shaped by the priority of a patriarchal perspective, they cannot read the hidden messages. Yet, they even cannot find a text to be read. However, female characters identifying themselves with Minnie are capable of finding all the clues and reading all the messages hidden in the text of Minnie. And they solve the mystery of the crime. Hence, they not only celebrate their common membership in sisterhood but they also experience a transformation towards their autonomous selves.