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Relationship Between MR Wright and Mrs Wright

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31 views1 page

Relationship Between MR Wright and Mrs Wright

Uploaded by

vrindhavrdas3201
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How do Mrs. Hale and Mrs.

Peters think about the relationship between John Wright


and Minnie Foster?
The play opens on the scene of John and Minnie Wright’s abandoned farmhouse. The kitchen
is in disarray with unwashed dishes, a loaf of uncooked bread, and a dirty towel on the table.
The county attorney George Henderson arrives at the house accompanied by the local sheriff
Henry Peters and the neighboring farmer Lewis Hale. The wives of two of the men, Mrs.
Peters and Mrs. Hale, both of whom appear disturbed and fearful, follow the men inside. The
play examines the relationships between husbands and wives, particularly a marriage that
ended in murder. The setting, a messy kitchen, reflects this.
Mr. Hale’s account of Minnie’s response to her husband’s death casts her as suspicious. Her
statement that she didn’t wake up when her husband was killed seems nearly impossible. Her
laughter and her fearful look are also treated as suspicious behavior. The men make various
assumptions about women throughout this play. One assumption is that Minnie is guilty and
they try to prove this, rather than try to understand her situation and her emotions. The men
are looking for facts, not context. The men repeatedly dismiss things as beneath their notice
if they are things such as the canning jars of fruit that are, in their opinions, women’s
concerns. The men never recognize that they have forced the women to be concerned about
these things, by not allowing them to be concerned about anything else. The men’s dismissal
reflects a larger mindset of devaluing women and their opinions and interests in general.
Ironically, this dismissal ultimately causes the men to overlook the very evidence they seek.
On the contrary women soon prove to be much better detectives than their self-important but
hapless male counterparts. While the County Attorney leads the investigation with an air of
bravado, his line of questioning steers Mr. Hale, and later Mrs. Hale, away from any
discussion of John Wright’s treatment of Minnie, as if their marital relationship could not
possibly have anything to do with the murder. Likewise, the Sheriff steers the investigation
away from the kitchen, dismissing “kitchen things” as insignificant even though the primary
suspect is a housewife.
Here both women in the play are deeply analysing the marital relationship between Minnie
and Mr Wright. Through the evidences they conclude that Minnie or Mrs Wright had a
miserable life in the farmhouse. Mrs. Hale, having known Minnie before she was married,
immediately understands that John Wright has stifled Minnie in much the same way he
strangled the canary. Whereas Minnie had once been a vibrant young woman who loved to
sing, she withered away after marrying John Wright, a cold, hard man who didn’t speak
much, didn’t care what she wanted.
Throughout the play both the women are relating and identifying their situation with Minnie
where the universal nature of women’s struggle and the feeling of solidarity towards the other
women is portrayed. These women are able to keenly observe everything in the murder scene
because they are also subjected to same kind of oppression. Through the change happened to
Minnie over the years they suspects the level of dissatisfaction Minnie had in her married life.
From a charming personality who got so much charisma in reflecting the positive vibrance
she got transformed to a self-absorbed and reclused kind of person. For all these changes Mrs
Hale and Mrs Peters are accusing Mr Wright’s self-centred, arrogant and sadist attitude.

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