수잔 글래스펠의「동등한 자격의 배심원」에 나타난 차이와 법

Abstract

Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” is about two women who unintentionally solve a murder case in a Midwestern farm house. The story reveals the difference and the conflict between the women’s perception and actions and their husbands'. While their concern is ridiculed by their husbands, legal investigators, as “trifles,” the women’s way of knowing and reading Mrs. Wright’s feelings and responses to the conditions of her life leads to their final decision which marks a radical resistance to the men and the law they represent. While the women’s resistance and decision about how to act on their knowledge can be seen as a female mode of ethics, Glaspell also points out the difference in perception between the two women and highlights the process of persuasion and alliance between them. The story shows how political power is deployed in preserving the law and in the process of the women’s alliance,decision, and action. As Jacques Derrida observes, the authority of the law itself comes from political power and its interpretative and performative force. Glaspell presents the women’s decision as a verdict by “a jury of her peers” and their act as a resistance to the existing power of law based on their belief, perception, and experience. The work shows how the difference or disparity in modes of perception and action leads to political judgements and that a movement toward justice entails a decision which cannot be guaranteed by any law or rule. “Difference” in Glaspell’s work can be read as the absolute dissymmetry between the general law and the singularity of the subject or the other. As Derrida argues, the act which no longer responds to the demands of theoretical rationality can be a movement toward justice, making possible the transformation and the refounding of law and politics. In this sense, the women’s verdict in “A Jury of Her Peers” offers the possibility of justice for others and differences.