43 pages • 1 hour read
Shirley JacksonThe Possibility of Evil
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Miss Adela Strangeworth
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.
Dave Harris
Dave Harris is Miss Strangeworth’s unwitting antagonist, although he does not appear until near the end of the story. It is he who discovers her dropped letter, and who sets in motion the chain of events that presumably leads to the destruction of her rose garden. While we do not know who causes this destruction, we do know that it would not have happened had Dave Harris not delivered Miss Strangeworth’s letter to Don Crane and identified her as its author.
Dave Harris is also Miss Strangeworth’s foil, in that his motives and character are the opposite of hers. While Miss Strangeworth makes a pastime out of assuming the worst about the people around her, Dave Harris seems to assume the best about them; his decision to hand-deliver Don Crane’s letter to him is predicated on the hopeful belief that this letter might contain a check. Unlike his girlfriend Linda Stewart—who wonders why they should do anything for anyone else, when no one seems to care about them—Dave Harris’s recent confusing experience has not made him cynical or isolated. In this sense, he has thwarted Miss Strangeworth without knowing it; her anonymous meddling in his romantic life fails to turn him against his neighbors.
Tommy Lewis
Tommy Lewis, the local grocer, is now known to Miss Strangeworth as Mr. Lewis. The characters were once on a first-name basis with one another, but as adults the differences in their social statuses made them more formal and reserved: “now Mr. Lewis was behind the counter in the grocery, and Miss Strangeworth was living alone in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street” (420).
In her brief exchange with him, we see how Miss Strangeworth will not allow Mr. Lewis to forget this social gulf between them. She responds skeptically to his polite observation that it is a nice day outside, then later repeats this observation as if it were her own, with the apparent aim of prolonging their uncomfortable conversation and making Mr. Lewis feel flustered and inferior. She also irrationally chides Mr. Lewis for “forgetting to remind her” that she always buys tea on Tuesdays, while remarking to herself that he looks “very tired indeed” (420). While in this exchange—her first and most prolonged exchange in the story—we do not yet know the full extent of Miss Strangeworth’s perversity, we can already see her relish of others’ discomfort and her capacity for using small talk as a weapon.
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By Shirley Jackson
