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.
Themes
The Isolating Effects of Privilege
While Miss Strangeworth’s behavior may seem antisocial, it also belies a thwarted loneliness. In her own way, she is dependent on the people around her, not merely to fulfill her material needs but as a means by which to measure herself. Her pride in being the “one Strangeworth in town” would mean little, after all, if there were not all of those non-Strangeworths around her, regarding her with what she assumes to be envy and awe: “But the town was proud of Miss Strangeworth and her roses and her house. They had all grown together” (423). It is significant that (at least in her telling) her house is sometimes mistaken for a museum, in its grandness and cleanliness, and that she finds this a desirable quality in a private home. It shows the hampering degree to which private life and public life are mixed in her mind, and how even when she is drinking tea alone at her table, she imagines herself performing graciousness for the benefit of an imaginary audience.
Miss Strangeworth’s pride in her wealth and her ancestry is so noisy and persistent that it comes to seem like a brand of shame. She can never escape a debilitating sense of herself as separate from the people around her, due to factors over which she has no control and which have nothing to do with who she really is. She lives in a house that her ancestors built, and in the grand style to which they were accustomed; she seems never to have gone out into the wider world or begun a family of her own, which makes her hold on her elevated social status seem that much more precarious and desperate. Her elevated social status is all she has, and in the way of such overwhelming dependencies, she simultaneously needs it and is desperate to escape it.
Her compulsive letter-writing can be understood, in this light, as an attempt both to shore up her privilege and to escape it. While she clearly wishes to sew discord among her neighbors, so that she can continue to feel superior to them, there is also something in her that wants to connect to them. The letters are anonymous because they are invasive and nasty but also, perhaps, because they afford Miss Strangeworth a rare opportunity to communicate with her neighbors without her fancy last name getting in the way. She even uses the same stationary that everyone else in the town uses, an unusually civic gesture, even if the content of her letters is anything but. When her neighbors find her out and get their revenge at the story’s end, Miss Strangeworth is of course devastated; at the same time, there is perhaps a slight sense of relief, simply because her neighbors have at last crossed her threshold and brought her down to their level.
The Power of Routine and Habit
Miss Strangeworth is a creature of habit, to the point of being a prisoner of it. Much attention in this story is given to the small, regular rhythms of her day: her stately morning routine of shopping and chitchat with her neighbors, her afternoon naps, her early evening tending to her rose garden. Even her anonymous letter-writing, an urge that seizes her unpredictably, is kept within certain ritual boundaries: She always uses the same pencil and stationary for her writing, keeps this paper locked inside her desk, and makes sure to deliver the letters after dusk. Somewhat illogically, she believes that no one will recognize her face during this time, despite her sense of herself as a recognizable figure even from a distance:
“Consequently, she timed her walk so she could reach the post office just as darkness was starting to dim the outlines of the trees and the shapes of people’s faces, although no one could ever mistake Miss Strangeworth, with her dainty walk and rustling skirts” (426).
Miss Strangeworth’s attachment to habit and ritual has several sources. It connects her to the past of which she is so proud, for she makes a point of doing everything the same way her mother and grandmother did. It also staves off loneliness and gives her idleness the appearance of purpose and consequence. As a wealthy woman, Miss Strangeworth has never had to work; she therefore compensates by making her daily routines as elaborate and finicky as possible and turning herself into an unofficial public figure. In this way, she turns even small talk with her neighbors into an obligation that hampers her already busy day: “Walking down Main Street on a summer morning, Miss Strangeworth had to stop every minute or so to say good morning to someone or to ask after someone’s health” (420).
Finally, as the quotation about her letter-delivering suggests, Mrs. Strangeworth’s attachment to habit is an unconscious way of keeping self-awareness at bay. Her delivering letters in the gathering dark makes little sense unless we understand it as a way of keeping her actions secret from herself as much as from others. We are told that she “had never given the matter [of her letter-delivering] any particular thought” (426), which suggests she prefers to think about it as little as possible. Were she to think about her letter-writing, she would have to understand it as a compulsion, something much darker and deeper than a habit. Her superficial focus on habit is an attempt not so much to tame her dark compulsions as it is to force them into a manageable, tidy shape.
Morality Versus Appearances
While Mrs. Strangeworth often broods about the evil that she sees all around her, her definition of evil is confusingly broad. The warning letters that she writes to her neighbors evoke bad behavior such as adultery and medical malpractice, but also the dangers of having “an idiot child” (424). In her regular life, meanwhile, nothing offends Mrs. Strangeworth more than the “sloppiness” she sees in her neighbor Miss Chandler, who has “not taken much trouble with her hair” (422). Mrs. Strangeworth sees herself as a walking corrective to this sloppiness and an embodiment of civilized gracious living.
Yet Mrs. Strangeworth’s notion of civilized behavior is superficial; it has everything to do with propriety and little to do with actual civility. That she can see a disabled child as a manifestation of evil akin to a murderous surgeon shows just how muddled and susceptible her morality is beneath her impeccable surface. It is instructive to compare her to Dave Harris, who shows real civility in hand-delivering her letter to a neighbor. In doing so, he breaks with the social protocol that Mrs. Strangeworth so values, and therefore illustrates the truth that sometimes being a good citizen has nothing at all to do with being polite.
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By Shirley Jackson
