“The Possibility of Evil” is a study of an individual who is at once deeply involved in her community and remarkably isolated from it. Miss Strangeworth is familiar with everyone in town: she knows where the strawberries come from at the grocery store, she is part of the bridge club, she donates to the local library, and she knows everyone’s secrets—or at least she thinks she does. In addition, Miss Strangeworth’s family has lived in the community for a long time, and she takes pride in the fact that her grandfather constructed the first house on Pleasant Street. However, despite the love Miss Strangeworth professes for her community, all of her connections to it are rather superficial. Everyone she talks to throughout the day is friendly with her, but she does not appear to have any real friends. Furthermore, the conversations she engages in are largely uninteresting, as they only pertain to matters such as nice weather, groceries, and library funds. When Miss Strangeworth is having these conversations, other thoughts are going on in the back of her mind that only come out once she is alone. Also, Miss Strangeworth is completely without family. Her parents are presumably dead, and she has no husband or children. She lives in her house with only the memory of other Strangeworths to keep her company. As such, Miss Strangeworth’s letters, which often center around severing relationships, can be understood as an attempt to replicate her own situation in others’ lives—that is, the loneliness of knowing one’s own community both too well and not at all.
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Community and Isolation Quotes in The Possibility of Evil
Miss Adela Strangeworth stepped daintily along Main Street on her way to the grocery. The sun was shining, the air was fresh and clear after the night’s heavy rain, and everything in Miss Strangeworth’s little town looked washed and bright. Miss Strangeworth took deep breaths and thought that there was nothing in the world like a fragrant summer day.
She knew everyone in town, of course; she was fond of telling strangers—tourists who sometimes passed through the town and stopped to admire Miss Strangeworth’s roses—that she had never spent more than a day outside this town in all her long life.
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.
Carrying her little bag of groceries, Miss Strangeworth came out of the store into the bright sunlight and stopped to smile down on the Crane baby. Don and Helen Crane were really the two most infatuated young parents she had ever known, she thought indulgently, looking at the delicately embroidered baby cap and the lace-edged carriage cover.
“That little girl is going to grow up expecting luxury all her life,” she said to Helen Crane.
Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion. Mr. Lewis would never have imagined for a minute that his grandson might be lifting petty cash from the store register if he had not had one of Miss Strangeworth’s letters. Miss Chandler, the librarian, and Linda Stewart’s parents would have gone unsuspectingly ahead with their lives, never aware of the possible evil lurking nearby, if Miss Strangeworth had not sent letters to open their eyes.
She had been writing her letters – sometimes two or three a day, sometimes no more than one in a month – for the past year. She never got any answers, of course, because she never signed her name. If she had been asked, she would have said that her name, Adela Strangeworth, a named honored in the town for so many years, did not belong on such trash.
There was so much evil in people. Even in a charming little town like this one, there was still so much evil in people.
“Catch old lady Strangeworth sending anybody a check,” Linda said. “Throw it in the post office. Why do anyone a favor?” She sniffed. “Doesn’t seem to me anybody around here cares about us,” she said. “Why should we care about them?”
“I’ll take it over, anyway,” the Harris boy said. “Maybe it’s good news for them. Maybe they need something happy tonight, too. Like us.”
Miss Strangeworth awakened the next morning with a feeling of intense happiness and, for a minute, wondered why, and then remembered that this morning three people would open her letters. Harsh, perhaps, at first, but wickedness was never easily banished, and a clean heart was a scoured heart.
Miss Strangeworth was a Strangeworth of Pleasant Street. Her hand did not shake as she opened the envelope and unfolded the sheet of green paper inside. She began to cry silently for the wickedness of the world when she read the words: Look out at what used to be your roses.
