Classic English Literature
Glaspell, A Jury of her Peers; Woolf, A Society (online or in Dover text)Susan Glaspell had a strong interest in drama. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa. This was very close to mybirthplace so I have special interest in her.She graduated from Drake University in 1899 at a time when few women achieved this education. As a result, she was able to start out injournalism and switched to full time writing as soon as she sold stories. Our story, Jury was included in THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1917. Shealso wrote a Pulitizer Prize-winning drama, ALISONS HOUSE in 1930.She married twice-a theater director (he died) and then she married a novelist and playwright. As you can see, for most of her life she wasinvolved with theater through marriage and her writing in both Provinceton and in Greenwich Village.She wrote the story you are reading as both a one act play and as a story. Both forms appear in many texts of American literature. Her lifetimethemes related to the limitations of both environment and gender on an individual. This story clearly shows that1. The title, Jury of her Peers has an equally popular and appropriate subtitle, Trifles. Explain why each title fits the subject matter.
2. What did Minnie Wright face that apparently caused her to snap and kill Mr. Wright? (note the play on the name)
3. The two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, both do something of a very serious nature and very out of character for them. What motivates them?What do you think will happen to Mrs. Wright?
4. How is the significance of gender and environment seen?
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came from a well to do family of brilliant writers who had such famous people as Alfred Lord Tennyson to their home.Her parents were widow and widower, each with children from those marriages. When they met as neighbors and married they had their own children.In all, eleven people between 8 and 60 lived and were attended to by 7 servants! That would make large families easy to manage I imagine.They were brought up via Victorian notions, the boys went to boarding schools, the girls were tutored at first by the mother and then by tutors.Virginia deeply resented the holes that resulted in her education.As we know, women often had short life spans then. Virginia had two traumatic experiences-the death of her mother when she was 13 and thecontinuing sexual abuse of two of her stepbrothers. Her older half sister married two years later and died from her pregnancy. Her aging fatherbecame a mournful, broken man.It should not be surprising that Virginia had her first mental breakdown during this time. Today she would be labeled manic depressive. Yet, weconsider her a truly great English writer. In fact, she stated, As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you. She felt it aided hercreative processes.With the fathers death and acquaintance of a group of brilliant young Cambridge educated, iconoclastic young men, she learned sexual andintellectual freedom. Here, she met Leonard Woolf, her husband. But the sudden death of a beloved brother from typhoid fever caused a physicaland mental decline. She did not marry Leonard for 6 more years at age 29. He was devoted to her, cared for her in her breakdowns and encouragedher in her writing. It is believed their union was sexless but it seems to have suited them. By the 1920s she was one of the best knownliterary writers in England.She always felt marginal in society, that women had been suppressed and suffocated. She began a long, lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West, a younger married writer with two children. This has been viewed as the great passion of her life. Much of her feminist writingdeveloped during this time, such as the famous book, A ROOM OF ONES OWN (1929).When German planes started to bomb England, her fears for herself and her country were unbearable. Unable to take it any longer, in 1941,certain she was once again going mad, she put rocks in her pockets, walked into a river, and drowned herself. She was 59 years old.1. A Society is a satire on what? The ladies begin a search to find out if men produced good people and good books-the object of life. What istheir conclusion? What is the conclusion of the ladies and the meaning for themselves? for their daughters?