To remember, to act, to forget: Tracing collective remembrance through “A jury of her peers”

Abstract

Two wicked blows with a blade followed by a crushing blow with a blunt object, likely the two sides of an axe at work, ended the life of John Hossack on December 1, 1900 in Indianola, Iowa. Margaret Hossack said she was asleep next to her husband, claiming not to have stirred during the gruesome assault, and to have awoken only to hear a door close and catch a glimpse of light. Tried for murder twice, once after a successful appeal of procedural issues, she was first convicted, served a year in prison, then set free after a second, hung jury ended in mistrial. Several of nine children and many neighbors hinted at incredible rage, violence, and abuse from John towards Margaret and the children over the course of a thirty-three year marriage. After her release, she lived thirteen more years (of which little is known), although there is some third-hand evidence that she did not find peace (Bryan, p. 1356, n. 395). Axe became rope, blows became strangulation, children vanished, and John and Margaret Hossack became John and Minnie Wright (nee Minnie Foster) as of the most sensational trials ever in the history of Iowa (Bryan, 1997, p. 1301) became a play, then a short story. Susan Glaspell, one of the Provincetown Players and increasingly recognized as one of the United States' finest twentieth-century playwrights (Ben-Zvi, 1989; Makowsky, 1993), was a reporter in Des Moines during the trial in 1901 (Bryan, 1997; Gould, 1966, p. 36; Ozieblo, 2000, pp. 28-29). In 1915, when the Players were in need of a script, she wrote the taut one-act play, Trifles. In 1917, Glaspell changed the title, enriched the detail of the story, and converted the play to the much anthologized short fiction, A Jury of Her Peers, now a small feminist classic (Hedges, 1986, p. 89) and canonical within the feminist legal community (West, 1996, p. 231). The story today is read in literature classes and law schools around the country, and the play, which ran almost continuously into the 1960s (Waterman, 1964), is still taught and performed in literature and drama classes. The story begins with Martha Hale leaving her home to accompany Mrs. Peters, their husbands, and the county attorney, Mr. Henderson, to the Wright farm. Once there, the men look for signs that Minnie strangled her husband. After Mr. Hale recalls how he came to the Wright farm the previous day and found John dead, he follows the attorney and the sheriff, Mr. Peters, about the farm searching for clues of Minnie's possible motive. Meanwhile, Martha and Mrs. Peters (we never learn her full name) are left to gather a few things for Minnie, who is being held at the county jail. Through a series of almost haphazard revelations, the women discover evidence that Minnie Foster killed her husband and why she did so. By looking through a messy kitchen, a battered old chair, a broken stove, a worn out skirt, a quilt with sloppy stitching, and finally a throttled canary, the women see a pattern of psychological abuse (at minimum) and loneliness that drove her to murder. Martha and Mrs. Peters are moved by Minnie's tragedy and attempt to protect her by hiding the canary and fixing the quilt. In contrast, the men cannot meaningfully interpret this farm wife's world (Kolodny, 1980, p. 461), indicated by their repeated belittling of the very clues they seek as women's trifles. The story ends with all but the county attorney leaving, but only after Martha surreptitiously has fixed the quilt stitching and pocketed the dead canary, thereby erasing crucial signs of Minnie's motive. Through the everyday matters of Minnie, A Jury of Her Peers and Trifles personify a feminist counter-memory to idealized, traditional home life. Glaspell's telling of what happened on the Wright (Hossack) farm participates in the recollection of a repeatedly forgotten, collective memory about terror and abuse within the home, and the consignation of that memory to an archive of the everyday. …