Author Question: What thoughts and memories confirm Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale in theirdecision to help Minnie beat ... (Read 46 times)

michelleunicorn · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

What thoughts and memories confirm Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale in theirdecision to help Minnie beat the murder rap?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

What is so suggestive in the ruined birdcage and the dead canary wrappedin silk? What do these objects have to do with Minnie Foster Wright? What similarity do you notice between the way the canary died and John Wrights own death?

What will be an ideal response?

tuate · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Mrs. Hale knows what a hard and lonely life Minnie has had; she knows the rough, grinding country life from her own experience, and she knows the particular burdens that Minnie has had to bear from observing them, and also from avoiding them: her guilt over shunning Minnie and leaving her to deal alone with her grief is a strong motivating factor in her sympathy and desire to help her. Mrs. Peters, more resistant to these claims through much of the play, is won over near the end when she remembers the boy who had brutally killed her pet kitten when she was girl, and relates Minnies isolation to her own situation after the death of her first child out on the Great Plains

Answer to Question 2

The birdcage has been violently opened and the bird has died by having its neck wrung. Clearly, John Wright has viciously killed his wifes petone of the few joys in her life, if not the only oneto spite her. The manner of his deathwith a rope around his neck, having the life choked out of himobviously suggests a deliberate act of retribution for the strangling of the canary, a retribution that only one person would be motivated to undertake. The thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing it that the County Attorney is hoping to find, it points all the more strongly to Mrs. Wright.