Before going into what I thought was a very good reading, let’s explore last week’s discussion over Maria Christina Mena. There are only a few thing that I would like to reflect on, so it shouldn’t take too long before we get into, what I thought, was a much juicier reading from this week. For starters, I liked Hannah’s question about narrative style. It didn’t even occur to me to consider how the stories would have differed if told from a first-person perspective. I feel as though telling the story from a third person point of view dehumanized the characters a little. This was obviously intentional, but I don’t know whether is was done to put the American and Mexican characters on equal terms, making American stereotypes of Hispanic culture seem silly in the process, or whether this portrait was simply done because publishing companies didn’t think that a first person account could sell. The discussion in class would lead me to believe that it’s more the second reason than the first, but I’d like to think that an author as talented as Mena would throw in subtle jabs toward her audience.

At first, I was apprehensive about this reading, because I had talked to others who weren’t impressed by the readings; However, “A Jury of Her Peers left an impression on me. I thought that it was a fantastic read which confronted many important issues. Among these are the way men view the opinions of women, the role of the law in being preventative rather than vindictive, and the isolation suffered by those living a rural lifestyle. These issues are all worthy of their own discussion, but I want to focus on the issue of physical death vs. spiritual death, which I feel is the most important topic in this short story.

First we must discuss the difference between Minnie Foster and Mrs. Wright. Mrs. Hale always insists on using the name Minnie Foster despite that fact the Mrs. Wright was now her legal name. This is because Mrs. Hale wants to view Mrs. Wright as she was before being married, back when she was a vibrant girl. To Mrs. Hale, Mr. Wright oppressed Minnie’s freedom in a way that destroyed her soul. Certainly, the story isn’t arguing that marriage kills a person’s soul, as Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale both seem to be well adjusted people, so what did it for Minnie Foster? One could point to the songbird’s death as the catalyst which triggered an endothermic reaction in her heart, but I believe that reasoning would ignore the necessary build up that led to her snapping. If we’re being cliche, I’d say it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but, considering the topic, I’d prefer to think of it as a crescendo, slowly building until the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Wright (or as the story would probably word it, Mrs. and Mr. Wright) reached its untimely climax, a grand finale which would make the most talented canary envious. So, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters decide at the end that Minnie Foster’s spiritual death was punishment enough for the murder of Mr. Wright. This leads us to an important question: Are physical death and spiritual death equal?

Let’s start with a known quantity, the physical dead. Those who are physically dead tend not to come back, though the advent on new technologies is making this less the case. We can safely ignore these technologies given the setting of the book and operate under the reality that a person’s body will, after death, never be animate again. From here we can segue to an important question: Does spiritual death exist? Let me be clear, when I ask this question, I’m not trying to provoke a religious debate. When I say spiritual death, I mean that spiritual death and physical death are mutually exclusive. The body either dies or lives long enough to see its spirit taken from it. To paraphrase, the question I’m trying to ask is “Can the soul be repaired in a way that the body cannot?”

The conversation about spiritual murder doesn’t end there, however. We must look at how spiritual murder, or at least assassination attempts on the soul, are treated by society. What methods do we have to bring spiritual murderers to justice? I can’t imagine that many measures existed at the time, but now we have systems in place to combat emotional abuse. Must spiritual murderers be human or is spiritual murder institutional? Do society’s problems slowly erode a person’s essential life force? I wish I had time to discuss this more at length, but I feel that by just raising these issues I have at least provided an opportunity for discussion.

There are a few more questions pertaining to this story (and I realize that I’m doing a terrible job of attending to the other readings, but there was so much to talk about with this particular story, and I didn’t want to shortchange it in the space that I had.)For instance, what motive did the husband have for killing the canary? That whole sequence seemed pretty fishy to me, because Mr. Wright isn’t portrayed to be a bad person, per say. His main character flaw is that he ignores his wife’s needs (which you can argue is a pretty series character flaw), but nowhere does it make him out to be a bird murderer until Mrs. Hale essentially says “Yep, he did this.” Also, what differences are there between editions of the story and why are these differences important? In particular, I feel that the final lines are important.