ecause when Mr. Hale asked if Mr. Wright would want to join him in paying for a party line, Wright’s reply was “folks talk too much anyway and all he wanted was peace and quiet.” When Mr. Hale foundMrs. Wright, she was sitting in her rocking chair “looking queer, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next.” Hale then went upstairs and discovered Wright’s body lying in bed, a rope tiedaround his neck. Wright had been strangled. The pieces of evidence found in the kitchen by the women paint a picture of a desperate woman who had suffered mental and perhaps physical abuse at the hands of her cruel husband for 30 years. Jars of cherries that Mrs. Wright had preserved were found broken and the women assume it is because of the cold. A roller towel was found dirty, dirty pots under the sink, and a loaf of bread on the table was left to go stale. Mrs. Hale doesn’t think Minnie Wright did it because Minnie is still concerned about the household things. She wondered how a person could be strangled without waking up or wakeningsomeone in bed with him. The women find a quilt that Mrs. Wright had been working on and the laststitches are uneven and Mrs. Hale pulls them out. Mrs. Peters finds a birdcage with a broken door hingethat looked as if someone had been rough with it. They find the dead bird wrapped up in silk in a box in Mrs. Wright’s sewing basket, it’s neck broken. The climax of the play is when the men return and Mrs. Hale hides the bird in her coat pocket and Mrs. Peters keeps the secret. The protagonist of the play is probably Mrs. Hale. She knew Minnie Foster Wright as a happy,beautiful, talented young girl before the years of toil and abuse by John Wright had turned her into a sad,lonely and perhaps, battered woman. Mrs. Hale was sympathetic because she also was a farm wife but at least, she had her children to keep her company. Mrs. Hale felt guilty that she ha...
