Well said, Abbe.
I love this play (and Susan Glaspell for writing it) because it packs a wallop without throwing punch! Such is the power of dramatic irony, we get to see what the characters don't.
My favorite line of the whole play is the final line, which is teed up by the facetious question posed by the County Attorney:
"Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?"
(Isn't that sweet? While the men are out gettin'er done, the women-folk have their crafts to occupy their "simple" minds).
I just love the power stance of these women in their dark, understated final resolve:
"We call it—knot it, Mr Henderson."
Isn't that terrific? I love it! "We," every woman, "not only endorse Mrs. Wright finishing up Mr. Wright with a knot around his neck, but unite in knotting up the foolish errands of every demoralizing and patronizing man who crosses us." The end. Amen. :)
Because these men look down on what they consider the women's domain, they cut themselves off from not only finding the truth but from even understanding it. Mrs. Hale hides the box with the dead bird in it to protect Mrs. Wright, but would the men have understood what it meant even if they had found it?
I imagine that if they had seen the bird, they would either have dismissed it, thinking the killing of the bird was too trivial to be a motive for murder or they would have seized on that very triviality to show how depraved and outrageous Mrs. Wright's actions were. They wouldn't have seen that it represented the lifetime of cruelty and loneliness that Mrs. Wright endured and that eventually drove her to murder.
Another question might be, now that we've seen how Mrs. Wright lived and we understand why she did what she did, are we meant to think her actions were justified? Does the author use the male character's condescension and smugness to show that a woman in Mrs. Wright's situation would have had no other way to escape her circumstances?
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