Two weeks ago, our class discussed “A Jury of Her Peers” and watched the film adaptation, “Trifles”. The film adaptation was very well done, capturing all the important elements of the story while also adding in a few pieces which I felt enhanced the viewing experience. I felt like the film really showed how subtle all the action portrayed in the book was. Additionally, I felt like the film did a nice job with the setting portrayed in the book. The entire house was very dusty and melancholy which helped set the tone for the film.

During our class discussion, Krystal and I (Team Group Wonder^TM Twins) talked about many things including, but not limited to, the importance of the location of the men in the women, the differences between the ending in the two different versions of the short story, and how the two different names should be interpreted in relation to the text.

I will be brief in my summary of Team Group Wonder^TM Twins’ discussion in order to leave a significant amount of space to discuss today’s readings. The location of the two groups of people was obviously symbolic. The men in the attic thought themselves to be above the women in the kitchen. That’s the spark notes version of it.

The names of both the story and the film were appropriate, although they both focused on different aspects of the story. The name “A Jury of Her Peers” deals primarily with what I discussed in my journal two weeks ago. Mrs. Wright had suffered a spiritual death, and rather than be judged by the men who were rummaging through her house, Mrs. Wright was judged by two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, who are more familiar with her psychological state because they have been subject to male oppression, which makes Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale peers to Mrs. Wright. These two women decide that Mrs. Wright has already suffered enough and has paid the price for killing her husband. The name “Trifles” works as well because it deals with how the men dismissed the women. The men in the story made fun of the women for worrying about “trivial” things, but the trivial things in the story lead the women to solve the mystery of Mr. Wright’s murder.

For this journal, I would like to focus on the short story “The Sleeper Wakes” because my final paper for this class will focus on class and race and I thought this story was the most interesting in that regard for a few reasons. The main points I will be discussing are the importance of race in American society around the turn of the 20th century and how geography played a role, how people identify as a member of a certain race, and what issues racial ambiguity presents.

The story focuses on a woman named Amy Kildare who runs away from home in search of adventure. When Amy was a girl, she was adopted by a colored family, the Boldins, and because she grew up with colored people, Amy always considered herself to be colored. However, Amy is white. When Amy runs off, she winds up in New York where she makes the acquaintance of an influential woman named Zora Harrisson. Ms. Harrison takes a liking to Amy and the two live together for a while. Through Zora, Amy meets Stuart Wynne, who is enamored by Amy’s beauty. The two are married, but Amy resents the way the Wynne treats colored people. They have a falling out and Amy lives on her own while working to pay Wynne back the money she was given as alimony.

Mr. Wynne is portrayed as a very powerful, influential man from an old southern family. Wynne himself is rather old, being 55, which doesn’t seem to phase Amy much. What does bother Amy is the way Wynne treats colored people. He frequently talks about colored people as though they are subhuman and disrespects them whenever given the chance. The novel takes place around the time of WWI, based on context clues, which puts the setting halfway between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. Colored people were no longer slaves and had the right to vote, but their rights were still heavily oppressed in southern states. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other obstacles to voting prevented black representation in the south. It wasn’t until Guinn v. United States in 1915 that progress was finally made in taking away these obstacles.

When Amy reveals that she is, in fact, colored, Wynne is so offended that the couple divorces. To the southern-raised Wynne, race is hugely important. To the northern raised Amy, a person should not be discriminated against based on their race. Historically speaking, colored people have been discriminated against more in the southern U.S. than in the northern U.S. and Jessie Fauset, the author, makes the easy connection in order to make the relationship between Wynne and Amy more believable.

The reason that it was so important to have Wynne and Amy in a relationship is that it opened up a discussion on racial identity. What makes a person belong to a certain race? Is it the color of their skin? This short story would argue that is not the case. Rather, a person’s identity of formed through association. Amy thinks of herself as colored because she grows up with the Boldins, despite the fact that she is white. This association proves troublesome to Wynne. Wynne will not be married to Amy anymore for fear of being black by association.

Racial identity seems to be a problem in this story, but it’s something which is much less important today. While studies have shown that employers are more likely to hire a potential employee with a stereotypical white name than one with a stereotypical black or Hispanic name, the effect of racial prejudice are much less prominent now than they were 100 years ago.

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.

Hello, my name is Jacob Meysenburg and I’m a senior majoring in Math and English here at Morningside College.  Additionally, I’m minoring in economics.  While these fields may all seem to be far-flung apart, I find that the diversity of my studies helps me adapt well to a variety of fields as well as enabling me to view my current fields of studies from a new and unusual perspective.

In terms of research, I think there’s a lot of ways to apply my diverse interests into this class.  For example, I think it would be interesting to look at the prevalence of women’s texts in American history, both critically and popularly.  There are ways to do this which involve detailed analysis from the perspectives of both a literary critic and a mathematician.

I’ve done a little bit of literary research before, mostly with Europe during the Middle Ages, whether it be looking at someone concerned with the common folk, like Chaucer, or a political scientist like Machiavelli.

The first article was something which I thought fit well with my area of study.  In particular, I thought that how it went into an in-depth breakdown of the minority and female authors who were included in American anthologies.  By showing how few minority and female authors were accessible to the American population, Lauter put the neglect given to these authors in perspective.  A quibble I had with Lauter’s article was how long it took him to get to the point he was trying to make.  Seven pages into his paper, Lauter finally got around to making his thesis statement, saying how he was going to organize his paper.

O’Brien’s article was insightful because it gave a specific case study to back up the work that Lauter did.  The case of Willa Cather is particularly interesting given the fact that she was accepted into the canon before suffering a fall from the ranks of major authors.  I didn’t know much about Willa Cather going into the reading, but I gained respect for her based on what I read.  What impressed me the most was how at the end of her career, she refused to allow her works to be published in anthologies.  How much of this was due to her genuinely wanting people to discover her work on their own versus how much was her being bitter over critical rejection is up to debate, but I still found the idea to be admirable.  It takes a great amount of self-awareness and respect for your profession to not force your work onto others.  On the other hand, it seems like Cather was just hiding from negative criticism.

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