The Possibility of Evil

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.