Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”
Setting, which can refer to both time and place, can be an important element to close read in any work of literature, but this is especially true of gothic stories,
which often rely heavily on setting to establish a particular mood and illustrate specific themes. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and
Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” take place inside a house, and almost entirely within one room of that house. In your paper, focus on “The Yellow
Wallpaper” and analyze the setting of the nursery or the farmhouse kitchen, respectively, in light of the entire text. What is the role or the importance of the
setting in the short story? How does the setting serve as a means of establishing the text’s gothic themes and broader social message?
In addition to working closely with your primary source (i.e. the short story) to answer the above questions, you should also cite from at least two of the
assigned secondary sources:
“What is American Gothic” by Allan Lloyd-Smith
“Setting” by Kelly Mays
“Female Gothic: Then and Now” by Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace
Sample Solution
Settings are major components of any story written. When reading a story it is often times the first important bit of information one will receive. The setting lays the framework for the entire story by introducing the mood of the story, and foreshadowing future events. The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is set in the late 1800s. The narrator describes the house that she is living in as “quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village”. Right away you understand that the narrator is isolated from other people by living in this house. She goes on to say that “there is something strange about the house”. The Yellow Wallpaper takes place in a single room, and the yellow wallpaper in the title bothers the woman stuck inside the room. This unnamed woman is frustrated because, after having a child, she experiences something similar to post-partum depression, a mental illness that women sometimes develop after giving birth.
