d a beautiful voice. The canary’s songs kept her sane. The beautiful song created by the bird was the beauty in her life. When Mr. Wright killed the bird it took that beauty away from her. This prompted her to go insane and kill her husband. Not only was the bird dead, but, her clothes were no longer decent and the furniture was faded. With no other source of beauty Minnie turns to quilting. Elaine Hedges tells us how important quilting was to women. Starting out of necessity it later became a way for women to express their creative ideas. Quilting ended up as a way to express how they felt through the use of colors and stitching patterns. This is why it is so important at the end of the story when the last block is messed up. The messed up square symbolizes her messed up life.Another point author Glaspell was trying to convey is the physical hardships of being the wife of a farmer. She comes out in the first paragraph by having Martha Hale run out of the kitchen to go to the Fosters’ house. Martha was busy cooking as they arrived. Even small little chores were hard for women because none of them were small. To can fruit there is a lot of effort involved. The fruit must be grown, picked, and still canned. Ms Hedges informs her readers of the physical labor involved by quoting old diaries, “Friday May 27 This is the dreaded washing day” (Hedges 96). One must not forget that there was no running water back then. One load of wash took tremendous amounts of labor: “One wash, one boiling and one rinse used about fifty gallons of water – or four hundred pounds – which had to be moved from pump or well to faucet to stove and tub, in buckets and wash boilers that might weigh as much as forty or fifty pounds” (Hedges 96). This reason alone explains why Minnie is worried about her jars while she is in jail. As one can see “A Jury of Her Peers” was not only written...
