Good dramatic moments are found in such passages as those wherein the noise in the chest is indicated immediately after Paul says he would seek the way of love; in the stirring immediately after Paul says, “I can kill the snake”; in Paul’s crushing the cobra and so drawing an immediate curse, etc. Point out several other examples.
Make a list of the struggles in order as they occurred.
What are the three main settings or scenes?
Does the happy dénouement convince you?
Author’s Concept of the Term Short-story
“No mere relation of harmonized incidents, no recurrent crises, can make a short story. There must be an inner voice. To explain my meaning: I do not count Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ a short story. It is a fine character sketch. It has a beginning, a very fine working out, but it gets nowhere. Three-fourths of the Russian short stories, so-called, are not stories at all. They are sketches, narrations of incidents. They are like a song, finely wrought, but with no dominant chord to resolve them into a real end.”—George Gilbert.
A JURY OF HER PEERS
Title. The intimate relation between the one-act play and the short-story may be seen in the fact that the narrative here told has its dramatic counterpart in the stage production entitled “Trifles.” The latter was presented in the season of 1916-1917 in New York City. What is the excellence of each title?
Germinal Idea. “A long time ago, when I was a reporter in Iowa, I went to the house of a woman who was being held for murder, and while the circumstances were not at all those of ‘Trifles,’ it was out of that experience the play grew.”—Susan Glaspell.
Facts of the Plot. Minnie Foster marries John Wright. Basis for trouble lies in the fact that Minnie is a lively girl, with a love for color and action, while John is a hard man, and “like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” They have no children, and as the years go by, Minnie is more and more lonely. The neighbor women leave her to herself; her isolation is pronounced. At length, after many years, she comforts herself with a caged bird. In a fit of rage, John wrings the bird’s neck. Minnie, half-crazed, lays aside the body of the bird in her sewing basket. Shortly after, while her husband is asleep, she strangles him to death with a rope. The next morning, she explains to a passing neighbor, who drops in on a business visit, that John has been strangled by “somebody”; that she is a sound sleeper, and sleeps on the “inside” of the bed. The neighbor notifies the sheriff. Minnie is taken to prison. The next day, the sheriff, Peters, with his wife and the district attorney go out to the Wright place to make an examination. Hale, a neighbor, and Mrs. Hale are with them. The men seek a cause, a motive, for the killing of Wright, but find nothing. While they are making large and futile observations, however, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover the dead bird and other evidence. With awakened understandings, the women conceal the evidence—Martha Hale takes the bird away in her pocket.