The Possibility of Evil

Miss Adela Strangeworth is a character who is never very far from her surface. Even in her internal monologues, she thinks of herself by her full title and imagines how she must appear in her neighbors’ eyes. She sets great store by the grandness and cleanliness of her house, and by the civilized regularity of her daily routine: “People must live graciously, after all, she thought, and sipped her tea” (425). Although Miss Strangeworth is a solitary character, there is a sense that she is never alone; like a royal or a celebrity, she needs the phantom gaze of others to exist. It is significant that even the table at which she sips her tea “can be opened to seat twenty-two, with a second table, if necessary, in the hall” (425).

Miss Strangeworth’s last name is a pointed one, summing up her divided nature. It suggests strangeness on one hand and staidness and respectability on the other; it also shows how these seemingly opposing qualities can coexist and reinforce and perpetuate one another. Miss Strangeworth’s attention to appearances allows her to deny the darker side of her nature, blaming it on a vague generalized “evil” rather than on herself. The more that she denies ownership of her darker impulses, the more persistently these impulses surface, and the more desperately she clings to her veneer of bourgeois respectability.