According to Laurence Perrine, there are two primary purposes for any literature – to entertain and enlighten. While entertaining is the easier part, Perrine opines that a literature should do more than just entertain, if it is worth scholarly scrutiny. Thus, a fiction can be categorized into escape and interpretive literature. An escape literature is one, which mainly aims at entertaining and intended as a time pass. Whereas, an interpretive literature aims at making the reader delve more intensely into the world around him. While an escape literature aims at taking its reader away from his world for a while, an interpretive literature takes him more deeply into it. O Henry’s, ‘A municipal Report’ and Susan Glaspell’s, ‘A Jury of her Peers’, are two works which would help us understand these literature forms better.
There are many notable similarities between these two stories. The plots are similar, as they deal with a murder, and justify the murders rather than condemn it. Both the authors do not portray the murdered as a victim but they empathize with the murderer. The stories have bits and pieces of evidence spread throughout the story, lots of coincidences and have an ending that heightens the suspense, and the narrative ends with a twist. Besides these similarities, Glaspell’s story has more realistic aspects than O Henry’s. This essay aims at, discussing the various interpretation of situations and characters in both these stories, and to find out what category of literature each of these stories fall into – escape or interpretive.
The main characters in ‘a municipal report ‘, namely Azalea Adair and Uncle Caesar, will not pass on for real life persons we encounter in our day to life. This does not mean that the story is altogether illogical and is a series of unrealistic events strung together. Despite having mostly unrealistic characters and situations, for the sake of an interesting plot, the story does have some realistically portrayed incidents and personalities. For example, the carriage drivers, who throng and nag the tourists to take their vehicle, are a replica of the ones from real life.
"Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it - jus' got back from a funeral, suh." (O’Henry, 1904)
The way they use their catch line repeatedly, is the same act we see from every taxi driver in busy tourist destinations. There are life-like situations too, like the passage where, an instant change befalls in Uncle Caesar’s manners, when he learns his passenger is a native of the South and not some Yankee from North. This perfectly reflects the Southern attitude of that era.
But the portrayal of Azalea Adair is anything but life like. You do not normally encounter a person like her in real life, who has a heart of gold and mind that is as wide as the sky, but would put up with that nuisance of a husband, be it in any century. Here is a rural woman whose clarity of thoughts have astonished even the most learned minds like the narrator, but she sticks to a marriage, which obviously lacks any romance. She has a clear grasp of every aspect of life and can say the most insightful opinions about very common things in life, such as the eventful nature of an outwardly calm city. But marriage, something which is the most special bond between two people, is to her, nothing but a torture she has to put up with. Why such a woman, who has so much potential, decides to bear the oppression inflicted upon her in the name of marriage? No, Addie’s character is not life like and it just fits the plot of a fictional story, and not a real life situation.
So does the character of Uncle Caesar. Here is a former slave, who is so poor that he could not afford a decent coat in the ever drizzling weather of Nashville, but he willingly gives his all to the daughter of his former owner. Even if we somehow understand this monumental sacrifice of him, it is hard to fathom a fitting logic behind his act of giving money to a person, which he knows would not benefit her, but would just be used by her alcoholic husband for his merriment. He could have done more to her just by buying her decent food through his money.
Not just the characters, some of the situations the characters find themselves in, also are artificial and just fit in a fictional plot. For instance, how does the same one dollar bill present itself to the narrator in three different times? First of all, it is a wonder that he should have noticed and remembered a one dollar bill so accurately, even if it is was so soiled. Also of all the vehicles in the town he chooses the one whose driver knows Addie, the very person he is going to meet. Not just that, he ‘accidentally’ bumps into her husband twice in his hotel, and what more, he sees the same one dollar bill being used by him. And in the end of all the people gathered in front of the drug store, the detached button of Uncle Caesar’s coat was seen only by the narrator, who arrived later than everybody. These are too many coincidences, and these sorts of situations, can be hardly be claimed as life like.
On the other hand, Glaspell’s, Mrs. Wright strikes us to be more real life like, than O’Henry’s Azalea. She too puts up with her husband for a while (for a long while in fact), but she snaps in the end, when she is subjected to one cruelty too many and reacts to her oppression. This is the main difference between both the characters. While Azalea does nothing to alter her fate and it was Uncle Caesar who relieved her, of her self-made prison, Mrs. Wright reacted to her oppressor by presumably killing him.
Moreover she is a simple sweet rural girl and not a writer like Azalea with revolutionary thoughts and ideas. And so her subjugation to an arrogant husband is more understandable. Not just Minnie Foster, but the portrayal of the other characters in the story too, reflects the people of the early twentieth century. The women were portrayed as they were in that period – playing second fiddle to men, being laughed at by them, yet had very strong minds. Men too were portrayed realistically – arrogant, patronizing women, laughing at them for taking domestic issues too seriously and over protective.
There is one situation though in the story, ‘A Jury of Her Peers’, which is little unbelievable. How an attorney who is well educated, experienced and determined in proving Minnie’s guilt, missed to look around the kitchen for evidence, and left the two women, who were in no way connected with law enforcement, unsupervised in the kitchen. It is hard to believe a murder scene being left to two outsiders, before the investigating team collected its evidences. Thus, this scenario is definitely not life like.
But other situations and characterizations are perfectly understandable. Like the predicament Mrs. Peters is faced with, by her duty as a person ‘married to law’ and as a woman who understands the plight of another one, and Mrs. Hales’ hesitancy to leave her kitchen and her guilt of not visiting her neighbor for a long time. The coincidences too are logical and well connected with the plot. Mrs. Hale’s assessment that something made Minnie to leave her tasks half fulfilled on seeing the half filled paper bag, is completely understandable because she herself just had left her flour half sifted. The same way the ladies’ interest in the quilt is natural, as anybody, particularly women of that era, would be interested in hand work. Thus, their discovery of the slain bird in the sewing basket is explainable and within logic, and so is their empathy with Minnie.
“When I was a girl, my kitten--there was a boy, took a hatchet If they hadn't held me back I would have.hurt him." (Glaspell, 1916)
So clearly O’Henry’s “A Municipal Report”, falls under the category of escape literature and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of her Peers”, falls under the category of interpretive literature. But despite the differences in the way these stories have been told, there is a common theme shared by them. They undoubtedly call for societal support to end the gender oppression which the author’s saw in their period. They, through clever choice of words, explain the predicament of the women in loveless marriages and the resultant oppression suffered by them. They also shed light on the understanding nature of human heart, which can view something as horrendous as a murder through the prism of compassion and perceptive, and can accept the death of a person as a logical solution. Thus in its own way each of these story has fulfilled its purposes – entertainment and enlightenment.
References
O. Henry. (1904). A Municipal Report. Web. Accessed on October 23, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.eastoftheweb.com/cgi-bin/version_printable.pl?story_id=MuniRepo.shtml
Susan Glaspell. (1916). A Jury of Her Peers. Web. Accessed on October 23, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html
