The Possibility of Evil

“Miss Strangeworth never gave away any of her roses, although the tourists often asked her. The roses belonged on Pleasant Street, and it bothered Miss Strangeworth to think of people wanting to carry them away, to take them into strange towns and down strange streets.”

Miss Strangeworth sees her roses as both a private asset and a public one; they are an integral part of her home décor, but they also represent her town. They show her old-fashioned conception of herself as local royalty who must keep up appearances for her own sake and for the sake of her subjects. The frequent mention of Miss Strangeworth’s roses foreshadows the story’s end, when the roses are destroyed.

“They had been in high school together, and had gone to picnics together, and to high school dances and basketball games, but now Mr. Lewis was behind the counter in the grocery, and Miss Strangeworth was living alone in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street.” 

This passage, detailing how class differences eventually disrupted Mr. Lewis and Miss Strangeworth’s casual friendship, suggests that Miss Strangeworth was once a different person. It suggests that her gradual awareness of her social status might have contributed to her strangeness and isolation. As such, there is a poignancy to the line about her living alone in her house on Pleasant Street; Miss Strangeworth considers this a mark of her superiority, but the reader understands it to be a kind of prison.

“‘A princess can be a lot of trouble sometimes,’ Miss Strangeworth said dryly. ‘How old is her highness now?’” 

This line shows the story’s frequent use of irony, brought about by Miss Strangeworth’s lack of self-awareness. Miss Strangeworth of course considers herself to be a princess, and she is far more troublesome than the infant after whom she is inquiring.

 “Miss Strangeworth hated sloppiness.” 

To the extent that Miss Strangeworth has a moral code, this line exemplifies it. She cares immensely about appearances and sees personal sloppiness as evidence of bad character. As the wealthy are better at maintaining appearances than the poor, this is a convenient philosophy for her to have; it allows her to see the townspeople as beneath her both socially and morally. Moreover, she herself contributes to the unattractive distress of these people through her secret letter-writing habit.

“She never knew when she might feel like writing letters, so she kept her notepaper inside, and the desk locked.” 

Miss Strangeworth is a character who can distance herself from her own dark impulses. The special notepaper that she keeps locked inside her desk could also be a metaphor for her own mind. In her mind, as in her desk, the normal and the abnormal are kept alongside one another, but separate. This careful separation allows her to remain a mystery to herself, and to never have to question her actions and behavior.

“Although Miss Strangeworth’s desk held a trimmed quill pen, which had belonged to her grandfather, and a gold-frost fountain pen, which had belonged to her father, Miss Strangeworth always used a dull stub of pencil when she wrote her letters, and she printed them in a childish block print.” 

This quote shows the degree to which Miss Strangeworth’s entitlement is linked to her destructive lack of self-awareness. It is partly the presence of her quill pen and fountain pen that allows her to write her malicious letters in pencil; she can rationalize that a person who owns a pedigreed quill pen would never write such nasty letters, even while this quill pen also gives her mileage to write such letters.

“She was pleased with the letter. She was fond of doing things exactly right.” 

Even about her letter-writing habit, Miss Strangeworth has a sense of decorum and appearances; the letters on the page have to be spaced just so, or else she burns the letter. While such painstakingness may spring from her need to disguise herself, it also serves a clear psychological purpose by allowing her to distance herself from the content of her letters and therefore from the harm she is causing.

“Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion.”

This is an arch and ironical way of saying that Miss Strangeworth is a rumor-monger who creates trouble where there is none. The irony in the line comes from its backward sense that facts are unreasonable—because they are stubborn and inflexible—and that suspicion is reasonable—because it is flexible and elastic. There is further irony in the use of the word “negotiable,” being that Miss Strangeworth is negotiating only with herself.

“The town where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet, but people everywhere were lustful and evil and degraded, and needed to be watched; the world was so large, and there was only one Strangeworth left in it.” 

Miss Strangeworth sees herself as keeping her town safe from the general wickedness of the world; the irony, of course, is that she is the one stirring up trouble in town with her letter-writing habit. It is her very belief in herself as a town protector and figurehead—and of the town as an oasis of goodness in a generally wicked world—that leads to such trouble and disorder in the town. This quote shows how one of the story’s background themes is the dangers of nativism and isolation.

“She debated having a cup of tea and then decided that it was too close to midday dinner-time; she would not have the appetite for her little chop if she had tea now.” 

This quote shows Miss Strangeworth’s amount of leisure time, and her instinct to fill this time with petty routines and errands. It also shows her acute awareness of her own needs and rhythms as distinct from those of everyone around her.

“Only yesterday the Stewarts’ fifteen-year-old Linda had run crying down her front walk and all the way to school, not caring who saw her.” 

This is another instance of foreshadowing, as Linda Stewart’s relationship with Dave Harris is broken by Miss Strangeworth. We learn later in the story that Linda Stewart’s parents have forbid Dave Harris to visit her at their house, presumably because they received a warning letter from Miss Strangeworth.

“She broiled her little chop nicely, and had a sliced tomato and good cup of tea ready when she sat down to her midday dinner […] Sitting in the warm sunlight that came through the tall windows of the dining room, seeing her roses massed outside, handling the heavy, old silverware and the fine, translucent china, Miss Strangeworth was pleased; she would not have cared to be doing anything else.” 

This detailed rendering of Miss Strangeworth’s lunch comes right after the revelation of her letter-writing and stands in stark contrast to it. The sensuous emphasis on the surface details of her lunch—on the heaviness of her silverware and the fineness of her china—comes across as strangely cloying, like the over-sweet smell of roses, and exudes a sort of simpering self-regard (“little chop”). We are seeing Miss Strangeworth’s lunch through her own eyes, and we understand how she dwells on its civilized surface to tranquilize and blind herself to the highly uncivilized nature of her recent actions.

“After her dishes were done and her kitchen set in order, she took up her hat—Miss Strangeworth’s hats were proverbial in the town; people believed that she had inherited them from her mother and her grandmother—and, locking the front door of her house behind her, set off on her evening walk, pocketbook under her arm.” 

This passage shows the extent of Miss Strangeworth’s mental confusion beneath her carefully ordered existence. It is senseless for Miss Strangeworth to wear one of her distinctive hats, being that she is performing a surreptitious errand. Yet she is so invested in being a Strangeworth, even when she is entirely alone, that she cannot resist putting one on, reflecting on its significance as she does so.