A Jury of Her Peers

Mrs. Peters is the sheriff’s wife, and her first name is never revealed. What the reader learns about Mrs. Peters is most frequently reported from Mrs. Hale’s point of view. For example, Mrs. Hale doesn’t know what to make of Mrs. Peters at the beginning of the story. She is timid, quiet, and acquiesces to anything that her husband says or asks her to do. However, as the two women discover more about Minnie Foster’s life, Mrs. Hale reports that “she hadn’t at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things” (151).

At first, Mrs. Peters says things such as “the law is the law” (153) to justify the men’s search for evidence, in the face of Mrs. Hale’s objections to their prying into Minnie Wright’s life. However, she also indicates that she understands that something was amiss in the Wright household, and as she looks around she says, “’A person gets discouraged—and loses heart’’ (153). Mrs. Peters sees beyond the surface of things, in a manner similar to Mrs. Hale’s acute observations.

In fact, it is Mrs. Peters who discovers the most important clues and calls Mrs. Hale’s attention to them: the “crazy sewing” (155) quilting square, the broken bird cage, and the dead bird. Though she discovers these clues, it is Mrs. Hale who puts the pieces together and forces Mrs. Peters to understand why Minnie Wright killed her husband. Psychologically, Mrs. Hale’s compassionate portrait of Minnie Wright convinces Mrs. Peters that Minnie has suffered enough.

In her role as the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters must decide what to do with the evidence the women have discovered. She must decide if she is indeed “married to the law” (160) as the county attorney puts it. Ultimately, Mrs. Peters decides that she is not married to her husband’s version of the law, but to a moral law. She intends to hide the dead bird but when she cannot, Mrs. Hale does.

A generally kind-hearted and respected man, Lewis Hale represents a typical, well-intentioned husband, father, and farmer. However, Mr. Hale treats the women, including his wife, as if they are jokes, making several comments that are dismissive of women in order to impress the sheriff and the county attorney, who are more important men than he is.

Sheriff Peters represents man’s law. Hiding his true feelings behind a jovial, humorous manner, Peters wants to be taken seriously as the law’s representative. As such, he also believes that the investigation must be conducted in a particular way, excluding all things that he believes from the beginning are of little consequence, including anything in the kitchen. As a woman’s domain, he considers the kitchen irrelevant to men’s concerns; it does not enter his mind that there might be significant clues there.

Mr. Peters’ jokes are often at his wife’s expense, and her timid and hesitant manner seems to be a result of his domineering, if humorously intended, insults about women’s place and women’s concerns.