How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #7
MRS. PETERS: Well, you mustn't reproach yourself, Mrs. Hale. Somehow we just don't see how it is with other folks until—something comes up. (102)
Mrs. Peters gets at a deep idea here. She might be an Iowa farmwife, but the concept she throws out here is straight out the work of high falutin' Existentialist philosophers like Sartre. Basically, it's the idea that we're all alone. We bounce through the world in our little subjective bubbles, and we can never truly know what's going on inside somebody else. So, in a way, we're all totally isolated, no matter how many people we have around us.
Quote #8
MRS. HALE: [...] But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—(shivers) Like a raw wind that gets to the bone, (pauses, her eye falling on) I should think she would 'a wanted a bird. But what do you suppose went with it?
MRS PETERS: I don't know, unless it got sick and died. (105-106)
This set of lines is crucial to understanding the ending of the play. Mr. Wright was so cold and hard to get along with, that Mrs. Wright's only friend was a canary. The canary's singing was the one and only thing that broke Mrs. Wright's awful isolation. The bigger symbolism seems to be that the canary represents the one bright part of Minnie Foster's soul that hasn't been crushed by the brutal isolation of being Mrs. Wright. Hey, we never said this play was cheerful.
Quote #9
MRS. HALE: (her own feeling not interrupted) If there'd been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still, after the bird was still.
MRS. PETERS: (something within her speaking) I know what stillness is. When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old, and me with no other then— (132-133)
This is a breakthrough moment for Mrs. Peters, who connects the isolation she felt when her first child died to the isolation Mrs. Wright felt after the bird died. It's this moment of emotional connection that pushes Mrs. Peters to go up against the law at the end of the play. It's ironic and more than a little sad that the thing that ultimately connects these two women is the shared experience of feeling like they're not connecting to anything at all.