Thursday, October 21, 2010
Concrete vs. Fickle
To go off of what we were talking about in class yesterday, I noticed another distinction between male and female detection in the stories we read. The female detection seems to be so much more inferior and doesn't matter as much. The evidence Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Wright found in "A Jury of Her Peers" didn't appear to be as concrete as what Sherlock Holmes found. One large distinction is that Holmes' answer and solution was clear whereas the truth of the case in "A Jury of Her Peers" was implied but never confirmed.
I think this is to place an emphasis on the concreteness of masculinity and the supposed fickleness of women (according to the general stereotype). Someone in class yesterday mentioned that the traditional roles and stereotypes were displayed in the two stories, and I agree. The conclusions in each story played more with the generalization of men and women. Holmes was focused on discovering facts and getting to the truth of the matter and Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Wright were more emotionally invested in what they found, though they were not searching for clues like Holmes was. The women did not come to immediate conclusions and it could be said that this demonstrates fickleness and lack of concreteness in decision making and reasoning.
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I actually did not think that the two stories provided a contrast between the stereotypes of the two genders. Rather, I thought that the two stories provided a contrast in the ways that the mysteries were solved.
ReplyDeleteIn "A Jury of Her Peers" both the women and the men were unprofessional and let their biases get in the way of their mystery-solving. The men, while following the law and the established code of justice, did not take all the evidence seriously and instead came in with a predetermined idea of how the murder was committed. The women, on the other hand, analyzed and objectively weighed all the evidence found, but let their emotions influence how they reacted to the revelation that Mrs. Wright was indeed the murderer.
Holmes, on the other hand, presented an objective way of looking at the whole mystery. He looked at the evidence and the people involved with a third party perspective, which allowed him to both analyze and solve the mystery impartially. This provides a contrast in the method of problem solving used by both the men and the women in "A Jury of Her Peers".
I did not think that the two stories contrasted gender roles. I thought that the differences in the two stories showed how both the female and male perspectives can be ineffective when attempting to solve a problem unless the problem is approached with an objective view from the beginning.