The Yellow Wallpaper and a Jury of Her Peers

 Both The Yellow Wallpaper and a Jury of Her Peers are about women who could be seen as crazy. In The Yellow Wallpaper Perkins-Gilman uses her experience with rest cure to show how ludicrous the idea of it really is. The author of the journal is recovering from giving birth and is put on rest cure by her doctor husband; however instead of getting better she seems to be getting worse. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and the woman/ women that live inside of it and this obsession begins to consumer her every waking moment and lead her the brink in insanity. When you really look at the story you wonder if she is really on vacation with her husband or if she is a patient in an asylum. Little things like the bolted down bed, the gardens, and the way the doctor and his sister treat her make you wonder what’s really going on. It’s hard to tell if she’s really crazy or if she’s right.

A Jury of Her Peers you know almost from the beginning that Minnie is guilty of killing her husband; the thing you don’t know is why.  Unlike most murder mysteries the ones who end up figuring out what happened are the women. They understand Minnie in ways that the men can’t and they also begin to see what drove her to kill her husband. Little things that the men don’t think matter are what show Minnie’s mental state before she killed him, the stitching of the quilt, half the sugar in the jar and half in a bag, and the table only being half wiped down. They also find the evidence the men aren’t able to, her motive; the dead canary is the reason Minnie snapped and the women know it, they just don’t seem to know what to do with that information.The sheriff’s wife sympathizes with Minnie for she has been in a similar position. The women decide that even though Minnie is guilty it’s not her fault and she shouldn’t be punished for the crime. They hide the dead canary, tying up all the loose ends and allow Minnie to have a chance of getting off the hook.