The Possibility of Evil

While the revelation of Miss Strangeworth’s letter-writing is a shocking one, it is not a complete surprise. It is an extension of what we have already noticed about her and her relation to her neighbors. The story’s close omniscient narration gives the reader access to Miss Strangeworth’s thoughts; the blinkered and repetitive character of these thoughts implies something is wrong with her and adds to the story’s simmering, claustrophobic quality. We see the exaggerated pride that she takes in her supposedly illustrious ancestry, and her needy willingness to explain her deep roots to tourists, who presumably care little about local nobility. We also see—in her dealings with townspeople like Mr. Lewis, the local grocer, and Helen Crane, a worried young mother—her combination of imperiousness and nosiness. She seems constantly alert to signs of private distress among her neighbors, but she treats them all like servants (gently chiding Mr. Lewis, for example, about forgetting her regular tea order). Her constant remarking of different townspeople seeming “disturbed” is itself disturbing; it is not empathic but more akin to gloating and disapproving.

Miss Strangeworth explains her compulsive letter-writing to herself—to the extent that she does explain it to herself, for she is a resolutely unintrospective character—as a preemptive need to alert her neighbors to “the possibility of evil”: “There were so many wicked people in the world and only one Strangeworth left in town” (474).