Miss Strangeworth In The Possibility Of Evil By Shirley Jackson

She thought she was preventing evil when she was actually creating it. In the short story “The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, Miss Strangeworth is a very neat and caring lady that lives in a small town that her grandfather built up. She is sending out anonymous letters to people of the town and alerting them of the Evil that is in the world. Miss Strangeworth doesn’t realize that she is really tearing apart the town and the trust of the people all because of her letters. She is an evil old lady, but she doesn’t even realize the harm that she is causing. Miss Strangeworth is an evil and mean lady that is making the people of the town not trust each other because her notes are telling people things that they don’t need to all know. “Didn’t you ever see an idiot child before? Some people just shouldn’t have children should they?” (Jackson, 1941, p.169) She does show some respect for the people when she sees them, but then she writes nasty notes behind everyone’s backs and no one knows who is sending the letters. Miss Strangeworth meant to drop a letter in the post office, but it fell on the ground in front of the post office. Some kids delivered the note and told the man who it was from. The man cut her perfect roses and she was about to lose the good reputation she had. …show more content…
“Every window sparkled, every curtain hung stiff and straight, and even the stones of the front walk were swept and clear.”(p.168).Her house was perfectly clean and everything was in place. Miss Strangeworth loved her roses more than anything and she kept them as perfect as she could. She was a perfectionist, everything had to be perfect and “when she made a mistake, as she sometimes did, or when the letters were spaced nicely on the page, she had to take the discarded page to the kitchen stove and burn it at once.”(p.169).Everything at her house seemed a bit too