Quote Response

"Wonder how they are finding things upstairs. I hope she has it a little more red-up there. You know, it seems kind of sneaking. Locking her up in town and then coming out here and trying to get her own house to turn against her!" Mrs. Hale (Glaspell 843).

I thought that this passage was a good example of some of the irony in the play. In a previous passage, the women had criticized the men for their comments about the lack of cleanliness in the kitchen. The men had made fun of the dirty pots and pans and towels and the broken fruit jars in the cupboards that hadn't been cleaned up. The women remarked that they understood how things are for a woman on a farm; that she was awfully busy and sometimes didn't have a lot of time to clean.
Only a few pages later, these same women were hoping that Mrs. Wright had straightened and tidied up the upstairs part of the house. Perhaps because they didn't want the men to judge Mrs. Wright further for her skills as a homemaker, or because they were also somewhat appalled at the condition Mrs. Wright kept the house.
I think it is important to the play because, as I mentioned before, it is another example of irony. It also depicts the standard for women in the setting of the play with regards to their duties around the home.
I enjoyed the line about trying to get the "house to turn against her". It was a humerous line, though I'm not sure it was necessarily intended to be so. The women were having a difficult time with what they perceived to be an invasion of privacy, though clearly the sheriff and the attorney were just scanning the house for evidence and doing their jobs. I think this also plays into the era in which the play took place.