Stages of Engagement by Joshua Polster

Author:Joshua Polster [Polster, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, North America, United States, General, 20th Century, Performing Arts, Theater, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781317358732
Google: zdS9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-16T16:11:51+00:00

Closing Arguments

In Patricia Bryan’s article for the Stanford Law Review, she writes about how the strategies invoked by the female characters in Trifles would never have worked for the Hossack murder case:

The idea of justifiable homicide by a wife was unthinkable, and denouncing either Mr. Hossack as a wife abuser or the community as having failed Mrs. Hossack would only have turned the all-male jury more strongly against her. And yet Susan Glaspell’s fiction suggests that, without considering those questions in determining responsibility and blame and without a fuller and more empathic understanding of the life of Margaret Hossack, justice was not done.

(1344)

Indeed, justice was not done. The court refused to relocate the trial, which made it difficult to find a group of male jurors who were unacquainted with John Hossack or were unprejudiced. The prosecution, as a result, successfully played on the male biases of the jurors (formed by societal concepts of female behavior – concepts that ironically helped to bring about the crime), and on the morning of April 11, 1901, they unanimously decided that Margaret Hossack was guilty. Five days later, she returned to court, where Susan Glaspell was undoubtedly present to hear Mrs. Hossack state to the judge, “Before my God, I am not guilty,” and to witness the judge sentence Mrs. Hossack to the state penitentiary for life (1345). After the verdict, Mrs. Hossack was taken to prison by the sheriff. Accompanying them was the sheriff’s wife – the woman who had sat by Mrs. Hossack throughout the trial, and who would unknowingly become the inspiration for Glaspell’s heroine Mrs. Peters.

In Trifles, Glaspell illuminated the harsh life of married women in a complicit society, and their limited options to redress injustices by abusive men in an indifferent judicial system. Moreover, she presented a space of feminist resistance where – despite male opposition – women were visible and heard. In this space, she showed the necessity for women to resist gendered laws inefficiently and unfairly administered by men, the necessity for women to be engaged in their justice, as well as the necessity to develop the critical skills to administer justice effectively. Moreover, Glaspell presented in her play the struggle for women to have equal protection, representation, and presence before the law, a right, as it turned out, which was not immediately won with the Nineteenth Amendment. As Sophie Treadwell demonstrated in Machinal – a play written after the Nineteenth Amendment – women were still unjustly tried in court and unable to have a jury of their peers. Suffragists believed that after the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment their new status as voting citizens would secure their place as equal citizens and grant them other rights, such as the right to serve on juries. However, their ability to have equal representation before the law – in the courtrooms and legislation – continued to be challenged and debated.32 In Trifles, Glaspell gave recognition to this long struggle for women’s civil rights, and helped to provoke and prepare

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