The Cultural Context of Conscience and Behavior

Although Glaspell injects her story with a bang-up deal of manifest humor, her subtext is as chilling in its trend as the psychologically grim and dense Crime and punishment. some other attribute the narratives share is that the context for the action is the set of preconceptions that the characters shape to their experience based on the way their society is structured.

A good deal of conjecture has been articulated about the tack of social realities on tender behavior. Marxist social theory has at is core the thesis that the concentration of wealth and blank space creates a condition of inequitable distribution of social goods, thereof unequal power relationships, with the result that piecekind experiences social lunacy. As Marx explains, for the wealthy and powerful alienation is positive and reinforcing, whereas for the proletariat the alienation is negative and destructive and shapes the structure of society.

The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation. But the source feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing . . . the contradiction between its human nature and its life-situation (Marx 133-4).

Everything in this description of humankind's existential experience implies a justification for the wholesale transformation of society

Wright was close. I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. She didn't even belong to the Ladies Aid. I suppose she entangle she couldn't do her part, and then you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby (Glaspell 11).

Lord, Walter. The substantially Years. New York: Bantam, 1965.

The treatment of conscience in Glaspell's play Trifles and the neat story "A board of Her Peers" turns the moral and narrative mickle of Crime and Punishment on its head. Whereas the narrative of Crime and Punishment valorizes the detective's insight, Glaspell's narrative makes the detectives figures of fun--a point amplified by their patronizing attitude toward "the ladies" and their "badgering over trifles" (Glaspell 10).

The moral vision of Glaspell's story is that come to is a radically just response to socially constructed (more exactly constricted) experience. Further, the character of that experience is interrogated intrinsically, as if to suggest that one should wonder little at the grotesque death of John Wright than at the incident that more such deaths are not discovered.

Evidence that the murder of the canary was repaid by the murder of Mr. Wright amounts to a more than rationalisation for--that is, an endorsement of--Wright's death. That is in stark contrast with Crime and Punishment, which argues that no one is above the law, whatever the circumstances; the old lady's acerb persona and exercise of financial sway do not reach Wright's power to damage. Because of the conditions under which Mrs. Wright lived, Mrs. Peters conceals the designate that would convict her in a court of law; it is precisely the same evidence that acquits her in the kitchen. Whereas in Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov cannot clear his conscience until he disabuses himself of rationalizations based on his social experience, in Trifles and "Jury" the evidence of Mrs. Wright's social experience anchors concealment of her motive, which has the effect of clear Mrs. Hale's conscience and of settling tha
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