Sample Essay in MLA Style

Alba 1 Felicidad Palmira Alba Professor Loibner-Waitkus Composition II 8 October 2023 Mercy Provides Justice: Moral Ambiguity Development in Tri es What is the relationship between legality and morality? Susan Glaspell's short play Tri es asks us to ponder this question, but it provides no clear answers. Part murder mystery, part battle of the sexes, the play makes its readers confront and question many issues about laws, morals, and human relationships. In the person of Mrs. Peters, a sheri 's wife, the play chronicles one woman's moral journey from a certain, unambiguous belief in the law to a more situational view of ethics. Before it is over, this once legally minded woman is even willing to cover up the truth and let someone get away with murder, thus demonstrating that mercy provides its own form of justice in this play.

At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Peters believes that law, truth, and morality are one and the same. Though never unkind, Mrs. Peters is at rst rm in her belief that the men will nd the truth and that the crime will be punished as it should be. Mrs. Hale feels the men are "kind of sneaking” (317) as they look about Mrs. Wright's abandoned house for evidence against her, but Mrs. Peters assures her that "the law is the law" (317). It is not that Mrs. Peters is less sympathetic toward women than her companion, but she is even more sympathetic toward the lawmen, because her version

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of morality is so absolute. When the men deride the women's interest in so-called tri es,

Alba 2 like sewing and housework, Mrs. Hale takes o ense. But Mrs. Peters, convinced that the law must prevail, defends them, saying, 'It's no more than their duty” (316), and later, "They've got awful important things on their minds" (318).

As she attempts to comply with the requirements of the law, Mrs. Peters is described as businesslike, and she tries to maintain a skeptical attitude as she waits for the truth to emerge. Asked if she thinks Mrs. Wright killed her husband, she says, "Oh, I don't know” (317). She seems to be trying to convince herself that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, though she admits that her husband thinks it "looks bad for her” (317). She seems to have absorbed her husband's attitudes and values and to be keeping a sort of legalistic distance from her feelings about the case.

Mrs. Hale is less convinced of the rightness of the men or the law. Even before the two women discover a possible motive for the murder, Mrs. Hale is already tampering with evidence, tearing out the erratic sewing stitches that suggest Mrs. Wright was agitated. Mrs. Peters says, "I don't think we ought to touch things" (319), but she doesn't make any stronger move to stop Mrs. Hale, who continues to x the sewing. At this point, we see her rst beginning to waver from her previously rm stance on right and wrong.

It is not that Mrs. Peters is unsympathetic to the hard life that Mrs. Wright has led.

She worries with Mrs. Hale about the accused woman's frozen jars of preserves, her half-done bread, and her un nished quilt. But she tries to think, like the men, that these things are “tri es" (314) and that what matters is the legal truth. But when she sees a bird with a wrung neck, things begin to change in a major way. She remembers the boy

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who killed her kitten when she was a child, and the sympathy she has felt for Mrs.

Wright begins to turn to empathy. The empathy is enough to prompt her rst lie to the men. When the county attorney spies the empty birdcage, she corroborates Mrs. Hale's story about a cat getting the bird, even though she knows there was no cat in the house.

Even after she has reached that point of empathy, Mrs. Peters tries hard to maintain her old way of thinking and of being. Alone again with Mrs. Hale, she says rmly, "We don't know who killed the bird" (322), even though convincing evidence points to John Wright. More important, she says of Wright himself, "We don't know who killed him. We don't know" (322). But her repetition and her "rising voice” (322) described in a stage direction, show how agitated she has become. As a believer in the law, she should feel certain that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but she thinks she knows the truth, and perhaps for the rst time in her life, legal truth does not square with moral truth. Her empathy deepens further still when she thinks about the stillness of the house in which Mrs. Wright was forced to live after the death of her beloved pet, which brought song to an otherwise grim life. She knows Mrs. Wright is childless, and she now remembers not just the death of her childhood kitten but also the terrible quiet in her own house after her rst child died. She reaches a moment of crisis between her two ways of thinking when she says, "I know what stillness is. [Pulling herself back.]

The law has got to punish crimes, Mrs. Hale” (square brackets in the original) (323).

This is perhaps the most important line in the chronicle of her growth as a character.

First she expresses her newfound empathy with the woman she believes to be a murderer; then, as the stage directions say, she tries to pull herself back and return to the comfortable moral certainty that she felt just a short time before. It is too late for

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that, though.

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Alba 4 In the end, Mrs. Peters gives in to what she believes to be emotionally right rather than what is legally permissible. She collaborates with Mrs. Hale to cover up evidence of the motive and hide the dead canary. Though very little time has gone by, she has undergone a major transformation. She may be, as the county attorney says, "married to the law" (324), but she is also divorced from her old ideals. When she tries to cover up the evidence, a stage direction says she "goes to pieces" (324), and Mrs. Hale has to help her. By the time she pulls herself together, the new woman she is will be a very di erent person from the old one. She, along with the reader, is now in a world where the relationship between legality and morality is far more complex than she had ever

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suspected.

Alba 5 Works Cited Glaspell, Susan. Tri es. UA-PTC Composition Mix, edited by Alexandra Gakos, 2nd ed.,

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e-book ed., W.W. Norton, 2023, pp. 310-325.