Evil Lurking Everywhere: The Possibility Of Evil By Shirley Jackson

Evil Lurking Everywhere

How would you feel if there were rumors going on about your family every day? Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Possibility of Evil” is a story filled with many strange things going on. Focusing on the life of Miss Adela Strangeworth, the story takes place entirely in a small town, one that she believes belongs to her. In the town, everybody knows Miss Strangeworth for one particular reason: her roses, which she spends a lot of time protecting and caring for, showing they mean a great deal to her. As the story follows what a day in her life looks like, from dawn to dusk, the reader learns Miss Strangeworth’s dark secret. The characters in the story are complex and help show how their ways of life are different from

Her grandmother had planted them, her mother had cared for them, and Miss Strangeworth followed in their tradition. She has never given away any of her roses, and she has never planned to: “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” (Jackson 26). Because she loves her roses so much, and the fact that she had never left her town for more than a day, she does not want people to take them away. The roses symbolize her, and her “roots” in the town. Much like how it is “her” town, the roses have to stay as well: “But the town was proud of Miss Strangeworth and her roses and her house. They had all grown together” (Jackson 30). The Strangeworth family has grown through the roses: when her grandmother planted them, their whole family sprouted. It became a tradition in their family to have roses, and it is what Miss Strangeworth is known for in the town. Miss Strangeworth was kind to everybody when she talked to them in person, but through the letters, she was evil. Someone must have found out about her writing the letters and how they affected the people in her town. They were trying to get back at her for being evil, but they were being evil by threatening her roses, the most dear thing to her. She had never thought of anyone trying to damage them: “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.” (Jackson 38). Whoever did it must know that the only way to get to her was to threaten something that was important to the Strangeworth family, and as seen through her emotions while reading the letter, she was astonished by what the letter had