I believe that The Jury of Her Peers is a classic example of people just trying to watch out for themselves while helping another person in the process.
How do I come to this conclusion you may ask? Well. Throughout the story we see Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale stand around the kitchen and sewing nook (or room as Moira describes it) discussing things about this lady's kitchen who neither really knew. Then as they come upon the clues of why she killed her husband they get scared. Mrs. Hale wants to hide the evidence because she feels she is doing Minnie Foster a favor while Mrs. Peters, the typical sheriff's wife, thinks they should tell the men.
I don't know how I feel about the way they are acting. It comes as a shock to me that they do some of the things they do. Take for example Mrs. Hale resewed peices of the quilt. She did it to help make herself feel better. Then as the women come to the idea that they should take the quilt and it's peices and come across the dead bird they find the motive they don't really know what to do with it. They argrue through looks and gazes at each other and in the end decide to help her out.
Moira says that the "women in this story show more solidarity with each other. The two women make the decision they do because they know how Minnie must have felt - they understand her pain because they deal with the same problems every day." I think that the women in the story simply are, as I have said before, trying to make themselves feel better for ignoring the woman, even though they didn't mean to. Mrs. Hale even says that she would plan on coming to visit Minnie, but something would come up and in the end she just didn't come because of the way the place creeped her out.
They feel better about themselves in the end and help Minnie by hiding her motive. I remember talking about this story in another class and someone had mentioned that that was tampering with evidence and how that was illegal on any number of levels. I understand their reasoning, but what would you do in that situation? Would you help a person to make yourself feel better or let her go to prison and potentially death row?
Posted by Tiffany Brattina at February 2, 2005 7:11 PMTiff,
I'm still not totally sure how I felt about helping helping Mrs.Wright out. There was one thing that bugged me though, the fact that they messed with all of the stuff in the house. Maybe I'm just too big of a fan of CSI. I know in today's world, these woman could have gotten in so much trouble for messing with the evidence. Basically this bothered me a lot.
Oh yeah, I also still stand by my opinion that John Wright abused his wife. That evidence is clearly seen. If it wasn't that, why would the author make it so obvious?