Detective Fiction and Social Spheres: Sherlock Holmes and “A Jury of Her Peers”

Detective Fiction has an interesting social potential, something I alluded to in the posts about Sherlock Holmes, but is more pertinent with Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.” Detective Fiction gives us a way to look at the different fears, concerns, and anxieties not just in general, but of specific social groups, and even how different social groups are anxious about one another. The juxtaposition of “A Jury of Her Peers” and Sherlock Holmes gives an interesting comparison.

Sherlock Holmes stories typically deal with a range of nationalities, racial issues, gender, and social classes. It has been strongly argued Holmes himself relies on these different social spheres to make his deductions, and it's his dependence on these that lets Irene Adler get away. Sherlock Holmes is almost always working to get people back where they belong, ultimately reinforcing Victorian standards.

“A Jury of Her Peers” works similarly: relying on social norms and expectations to identify where there's deviance, but to a different end than Sherlock Holmes. Rather than reinforce the social norms, “A Jury of Her Peers” works to criticize the social norms in the way it presents gender, marriage, and household dynamics. The gender dynamic is the main one here because gender determines social roles: men are farmers, attorneys, and sheriffs. Women are housewives. Men work outside the home in the serious business world. Women work in the home and kitchen, surrounded by, to use the men's term, “trifles.”

Bad men in Sherlock Holmes stories fail in their prescribed social roles: they are bad husbands, brothers, and lovers, and Holmes comes to remove the bad masculinity and replace it with Victorian normativity. “A Jury of Her Peers” features a bad husband but the other male characters make no suggestion they see him as a bad husband. If anything, they criticize the way Minnie has run her house, where Martha and Mrs. Peters are able to see how Mr. Wright made Minnie’s life miserable by being a bad husband. “A Jury of Her Peers” doesn't say “Here's an example of a man failing at his social role” but rather, “Here's a woman who suffered because she was caught in a bad situation with a bad husband.”

When we read “A Jury of Her Peers” as not about a murder but about the way women are treated and the bad situations women have, we stop looking just at Minnie Foster and look at how the other women in the story are represented. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters may not suffer to the same extent Minnie Foster did, but they are more victims of social normativity than benefactors: Martha Hale is clearly more mature and rational than her husband, but she does as he says because he's her husband, and Mrs. Peters, “married to the law” is tacit and nervous, overshadowed by her husband. Martha Hale and Mrs. peters situation is most exemplified by the silence: rather than defend Minnie Foster, they hide the incriminating bird. To a modern reader, this can seem odd, but women in 1917 wouldn't have been listened to.

“A Jury of Her Peers” gives us a unique look of a woman's perspective on social situations from a century ago. Fiction’s ability to transport us to different lives is hardly a secret. Detective Fiction, though, does interesting things with this social dynamic. Specifically, by placing the detective in new, often unfamiliar situations. Doing so requires the detective have an outsider's perspective while still having to understand the culture if they're to solve the mystery. In doing so a detective may have to go from social sphere to social sphere getting a better understanding of customs and anxieties as they see how people behave appropriately and inappropriately in these various subcultures to solve the mystery.