Compare And Contrast Susan Glaspell And A Jury Of Her Peers

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Late one December night in 1900, prominent farmer John Hossack was brutally murdered in his home. One of the first on the scene was Susan Glaspell, a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. Throughout the duration of the case, Glaspell wrote and published over two-dozen articles on the murder and the trial that followed. However, nearly seventeen years later, Glaspell was inspired to write a short story based on the events of the Hossack case. Eventually, this story would become a successful theatrical play. While both mediums represent the murder, there are a plethora of similarities and differences in perspective, details included, and characters. While both stories told essentially the same course of events, they were each told from vastly different perspectives. Essentially, “A Jury of Her Peers” is written in a narrative manner, and focuses on the thoughts and actions of Mrs. Hale, whereas Glaspell’s original articles are more factual as shown through the …show more content…
In this line, Glaspell is obviously focusing on Martha Hale’s emotions and reactions rather than fact based evidence, as in the original articles. In addition, the perspective established in the short story is that of someone who knew the victim previously and was familiar with the family. Contrastingly, the original articles were written from the perspective of Glaspell herself, an outsider with no previous knowledge of the situation, and this is expressed in the line “A farmer named Hossack was struck over the head and killed by unknown parties, at his home a few miles out from Medford” (Glaspell 1). In this quote, it is quite obvious that this description is coming from someone who had no connections to the victim, whereas in “A Jury of Her Peers”, the main character had known the victim. Additionally, Glaspell does not include any emotional reactions in her original articles, unlike in “A Jury of Her Peers”. However, despite their differences, both stories
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