This is a great question for a number of reasons!
Certainly this is a play when the women win against the men hands down! What is
fascinating about this play is the way that the author uses dramatic irony so well to
highlight the ignorance and chauvinism of the males in their judgement of the
women.
The dramatic irony in this short play lies around
the crucial fact that the men are completely unable to find a motive for the killing of
John Wright whilst the women are, although they are disparaged by the men for concerning
themselves with "trifles", which clearly in their opinion can hold no interest to their
"serious" investigations.
You will want to look at how the
men mock the women and infer that they know nothing, only concerning themselves with
"womanly" activities. A key example of this, and one that is referred to again and again
at various points in the play to highlight the irony, concerns the quilt that Mrs.
Peters and Mrs. Hale find. Mrs. Hale says of this
quilt:
It's
log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn't it? I wonder if she was goin' to quilt it or just knot
it?
Note then that the men
descend the stairs, and the Sherrif repeats her words, drawing a laugh from the men. It
is highly crucial then, that straight away after this, whilst Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters
are taking up their time with "little things" as Mrs. Hale says, that they find the
motive in the piece of crooked sewing, that gives evidence of "anger, or - sudden
feeling", as Mrs. Peters reports Mr. Henderson saying. Note how Mrs. Hale describes what
she sees:
readability="11">
Mrs. Peters, look at this one. Here, this is the
one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the rest of it has been so nice and
even. And look at this! It's all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn't know
what she was about!
The
women, by engaging in their "trifles", have found the motive that the men have been
looking for, whilst they have been stomping ineffectually all around the house. The
answer was under their noses all the time, but needed a woman's knowledge to piece it
together.
Therefore the men throughout are disparaging and
dismissive of the women and what they can offer to the "real" investigation that the men
think they are engaged in.
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