When I first started reading "Little Selves" I thought "great" eleven pages about an old woman dying, but by the second and third pages I felt like I was being drawn in from "outside the magic circle of comprehension". Often it is assumed that towards the end of an older person's life that they are worrying themselves about what they would have done differently, as the young woman points out about her own aunt "if I could be twenty again, wouldn't I do it different". As I got involved in Margaret's story I realized that she was not concerned with her death in the traditional sense or regrets of past choices, she had accepted her pending death and she did not regret her choices. Margaret was trying to get back to the memories of when she was small in Ireland, "gone past! I must be getting back to the beginning".
The author tells us that Margaret immigrated to America by herself, "her lone pilgrimage". Her memories tell the reader she is from Ireland, the memory of her father and the leprechaun and her mother and the fairies tells the reader about a simpler life in Ireland. All four sets of my great grandparents immigrated to America around that same time, from Canada (two sets), Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Two sets of my grandparents immigrated through Ellis Island, my great grandmother passed through Ellis Island twice on her own. I often wondered what that experience was for her. I do know that she felt it was very important for her children to learn English and to be Americans. She was independent, accumulated property, worked in the woolen mill until she was seventy, and was the first in her neighboorhood to own a television.
Margaret is worried that her younger self, her family and customs will be "lost" when she dies, the connection with her niece allows her to share those joyful memories of the past. "She recreated her earlier selves and passed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them from oblivion". I have often thought with sadness how much of my great grandparents' families, history, language, and cultural customs have been lost with their deaths. With every generation we become Americans we lose our families culture. How scary for those immigrants whose lives were changing so quickly to leave this world with the knowledge in 2 or 3 generations their stories will be silent.
In "Jury of Her Peers", the author takes us to the scene of a murder, a wife has murdered her cruel husband. The story takes place in a time where outside of the "city" people are still isolated, they don't have cars and phones are rare. It is a time where a woman is kept so busy in her home doing daily tasks that she doesn't have time to gather with other women. Women didn't have the rights we do today, they are often treated as property.
In the beginning of the story the two women are not keen on each other, they are not friends. By the end of the story the women share a common bond, protecting another woman that they know has had a painful life at the hands of a cruel man. They are protecting her in the only way they can during this era, they are silent.
The two women are tasked with gathering the suspected woman's belongings to bring to her in jail, while the "wise" men search out details of the murder. This is a time in our history that women were considered mindless and that they belonged in the house taking care of their husband and children, men were the smart ones. It becomes evident in the story that while the same clues were under the men's noses, the women were able to piece together the story of what happened and why it happened. The dead man had been cruel to his wife, the brutal killing of her cherished bird had been the final act to push her to murder. While she could have picked up the gun that was kept in the house she killed her husband in the same way he killed her bird. A poetic justice.
The two women bond in the knowledge that the bird is symbolic of all this woman's dreams, dreams that her husband had killed. He had silenced her song. While the two women had not been friends in the beginning, in the end they will share a bond of protection to the accused woman. They come to an understanding that were not going to aid the men in finding the motive for this murder, they would "protect" the accused woman now where they had not been able to before. "I should have visited..."
While women's rights have changed drastically in the last century since this story was written, the unfortunate truth is there are still woman who are abused by their husbands. Today there is an understanding about how an abused person can be pushed to the point of killing their abuser but that was not the case in this time.
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