43 pages • 1 hour read
Shirley JacksonThe Possibility of Evil
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Roses
Miss Strangeworth takes great pride in her roses, keeping them on display while also keeping them to herself. While she enjoys the attention that the roses bring her from tourists—and often uses this attention as a pretext to launch into a story about her deep roots in the town—she is loath to bring her roses to any town events: “When the new minister came, and the ladies were gathering flowers to decorate the church, Miss Strangeworth sent over a great basket of gladioli” (420). She prefers to use the roses as home decoration, and their smell comforts her when she returns home from errands.
For Miss Strangeworth, the roses are like a family crest: a symbol of her illustrious ancestry and her aristocratic specialness. This symbol must be kept separate from her neighbors to maintain its power, but it also must be visible to her neighbors; the fact that Miss Strangeworth decorates her home with her roses shows how consoled she is by her public image (or what she perceives to be her public image) even when she is alone, and how little separation there is between her private and public identities. When her roses are (presumably) trampled on at the end of the story, she experiences it as a true violation, one that goes well beyond the cosmetic.
Unmarked Stationary
Miss Strangeworth makes a point of using unmarked, multicolored stationary to write her special anonymous letters. Some of her reasons for doing this are practical; she does not want to be found out, as she would be if she sent these letters with “her usual stationary […] heavy and cream-colored, with ‘Strangeworth House’ engraved across the top” (423). But she has other, more complicated motivations as well. The multicolored stationary is popular in her town, and while Miss Strangeworth holds herself aloof from her neighbors, she also yearns to be embraced by them. Using the same stationary as her neighbors allows Miss Strangeworth to escape, for a moment, the burden of her fancy last name, to pretend to be someone different and more regular.
This masquerade in turn allows Miss Strangeworth to disown the wrongness and perversity of what she is doing. She is a character who defines herself, even to herself, as a Strangeworth; in using unmarked stationary—and writing with a pencil and with different handwriting—she is in effect turning her back on herself and carrying out her actions in a kind of dream state, one that she will deny in her regular, waking life. As long as she uses her unmarked stationary, she need not face whatever compulsions have driven her to write her disturbing notes; the stationary shows the extent of her dependence on habit and ritual, even or especially when she is on her least civilized behavior. More broadly, the stationary shows how the very wealthy, by having fastidiously ordered lives, manage to keep self-awareness at bay.
Foldout Dining Table
Miss Strangeworth lives alone in a grand, well-kept house that tourists occasionally mistake for a museum. The house’s lack of coziness and intimacy—its imposing, public character—seems to be exactly what Miss Strangeworth so values about it. This is because she is attached to her own pubic identity as an ancestor of one of the town’s original founders.
There is a sense that Miss Strangeworth is never alone, not even when she is alone in her house; she seems always to be performing civilized behavior before a phantom audience. Her predicament is symbolized by the table at which she takes her tea, a dining table that “could be opened to seat twenty-two, with a second table, if necessary, in the hall” (425). It is doubtful that Miss Strangeworth ever invites real guests to dine with her at this table, yet it is equally difficult to imagine her drinking her tea at a humble table for one. The foldout dining table is her way of keeping herself company, and it shows the extent of her lonely self-regard.
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By Shirley Jackson
