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At more than a dozen points in “A Jury of Her Peers,” characters laugh or refer to laughter. Not once, however, is the laughter a sound of unmixed joy or happiness. Instead, it serves two functions: to mock and to evade. Laughter serves as a motif that guides readers as they interpret how the characters react to each other and to the dire situation in which they find themselves.
Mocking laughter belongs to the male characters, and they turn it against the women, including Minnie, throughout the story. Minnie’s odd laughter, when Mr. Hale finds her rocking in her kitchen, contributes to her arrest. The men laugh mockingly at the women’s interest in things that matter to them—for example, the effort that went into Minnie’s jars of fruit. They take special delight in laughing at the women for wondering how Minnie planned to make the quilt, renewing their joke three times and, of course, setting up the story’s final incriminating line. They laugh at the notions that the women would take anything “dangerous” to Minnie and that they could find clues to a crime. Because the men laugh at the wrong things, they fail to prove a motive in Wright’s murder.
Evasive laughter belongs mainly to Mrs. Peters, whose laughter helps her avoid the unpleasant facts that pile up and relieves her nervousness about being at the scene in the first place. Mrs. Hale, the more resolute woman, laughs only once, and it may be the only genuinely healthy laughter in the story. She’s amused by the idea of being afraid of cats. But she does speak of laughter, to fault the men for laughing at her and Mrs. Peters. Being targets of the men’s mockery provides the women, who don’t know each other well, with a common grievance.
