Secret Harboring of Fugitives -- Term Paper

The image of the law arises, but like the woman, the captain has already experienced a kind of internal, moral shift. Like the woman the captain cannot bear to morally condemn the murderer, or reveal the fact that Leggatt is on his ship when the authorities arrive. Captain Archbold wants to act according to the law, like the men of the Glaspell tale, but Leggatt's protective captain pretends the ship is empty and points out that Leggatt's actions helped save the ship during a storm.

The captain, from a law-abiding man, has suddenly become a man who will evade the law, because he mysteriously perceives himself to be the same as another man. Unlike the feminist identification or mirroring that occurs in the Glaspell tale, the Conrad tale's sense of a "mirror image" of two psychologically united selves is far more mysterious. Eventually, the captain agrees to allow Leggatt to swim to shore. He watches the white hat that he has given Leggatt as a kind of identifying mark, a trifle, the women of Dickson County might say, and rather than regretting his actions on the first ship he has commanded, he feels a sense of strange peace that he has allowed his double to escape.

The sea captain realizes that he will never be the same man, as the women realize that they will always have a shared kinship, now that they collectively understand what happened to Mrs. Wright. "I watched the hat -- the expression of my sudden pity for his mere flesh. It had been meant to save his homeless head from the dangers of the sun. And now -- behold -- it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ignorance of my strangeness.Ha! It was drifting forward, warning me just in time that the ship had gathered sternaway." The nameless captain has been saved, he feels, by this sense of connection with another -- his ship has been physically saved by the presence of Leggatt in the water, and somehow he has been saved internally like the fleeing man. Likewise, if anything ever happens to any of the women of the Glaspell tale, they will be saved because of their unity with one another.

The changes in both works are both external and internal, and both are life-long changes, although the changes that take place in the Glaspell story may have greater external consequences. The external change in "A Jury of Her Peers" is the acknowledgement, however quiet, that the women are banded together to help one another, if they ever face abuse from their husbands. The women, it is also implied, have become radicalized because of the discovery of the suffering of Mrs. Wright. In the Conrad tale of "The Secret Sharer," another tale of identification with a murderer and protecting a fugitive from the law, the captain has changed -- he sees his own sinning capability in the eyes of another man, as well as the capacity for human redemption, and experiences the external, physical salvation of the first ship he ever captained.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. "The Secret Sharer." Project Gutenberg e-text. 9 Feb 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/220/220.txt

Glaspell, Susan. "A Jury of Her Peers." Learner.org. Full text. 9 Feb 2008. http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html.....