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.

Detecting Sympathy in “A Jury of Her Peers”

Not all fictional detectives are the distant, objective Sherlock Holmes; not all detective stories end with clear, clean solutions like Holmes' does; and not every mystery is rooted in the overtly threatening scandal and conspiracy, bringing to light the evil machinations of villainous figures. Some detectives are sympathetic, amateurs, and their adventures offer more criticism than resolution.

For this, turn to Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers,” a 1917 short story that uses a crime and elements of detective fiction in an early feminist critique of the expectation that a woman stays in the home and supports her husband. If that seems like a tall order, it's a major plot point in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Speckled Band". However, instead of the conservative British Doyle and his Holmes who preserve the social order, we're looking at the fiction of an early American feminist critiquing the social order.

Ostensibly, the story is a murder investigation: Mr. John Wright has been killed and his wife, Minnie Foster, claims to have been asleep while he was strangled. She has since been taken away, held for the murder, while Sheriff Peters and County Attorney George Henderson investigate. To help, they bring along Mr. Hale, who discovered the murder, and his wife, Martha Hale, was brought to help the Sheriff's wife gather a few items for Mrs. Wright while the men check out the bedroom – the scene of the murder – and the barn. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters therefore spend the story in the kitchen, analyzing and commenting on the state of Minnie Foster’s life once she was married.

A traditional detective story would follow those investigating the murder and look for clues about the murder weapon and motive, to prove whether or not Mrs. Wright did or did not kill her husband. Most detective stories make this easy by bringing in outside detectives, like Holmes, or following the police force, like Sheriff Peters, to investigate. Doing so allows for an objective, almost scientific perspective. “A Jury of Her Peers,” however, chooses to go the sympathetic route. Martha Hale was once Minnie Foster's friend, and laments never visiting her old friend, and it's Martha's role as a friend and fellow country housewife that allows her and Mrs. Peters to read the clues that amount to a life and not just to an event.

It becomes clear to the women that Minnie Foster killed her husband, but that she isn't the villain. The story juxtaposes Martha Hale's memory of Minnie Foster, a happy, friendly person who loved to sing, with the dark, hollow, unkempt house filled with half-completed housekeeping tasks, she has occupied for 20 years as Mrs. Wright. The name “Wright” becomes ironic: Mr. Wright is hardly “Mr. Right,” and even suggesting that Minnie Foster, Mrs. Wright, was right to do what she did. This becomes clearest with the death of the canary, a songbird, whose body Minnie kept in a box. Martha reflects on how Minnie used to sing, a comment that symbolically brings the two together: both sang, and singing is a public act. One can certainly sing in private, but singing is often done for the enjoyment of others. Just as Mr. Wright broke the bird's neck, Minnie Foster, literally, crushed his neck and windpipe. A retaliation for twenty years of marriage wherein she was silenced and kept at the house in the hollow.

It can be easy to look at this story and simply say it's interesting because of its use of detective fiction and how it uses personal relationships and connections in ways more traditional detective fiction doesn't. There is still, however, the social perspective: how the characters and events become critiques of larger, real world social issues and concerns.

More on that in the next post.