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). She believes her elevated social position confers a kind of custodianship upon her, a sense of noblesse oblige and moral superiority toward those who are less fortunate than she. In reality, of course, it is she who is stirring up all of the trouble, and while her behavior may seem perverse and senseless, it makes a deep-rooted psychological sense. For we can understand Miss Strangeworth as a character who is obsessed with appearances, and who suspects, at the same time, that she may be nothing beneath her fancy house, her beautiful rose garden, and her grand last name. Her intimate meddling with the townspeople’s lives, therefore, is a way of ensuring that they remain beneath her, and so of keeping any uncomfortable self-awareness at bay. In much the same way that she hands off her house-cleaning to servants, she projects her own internal darkness and perversity on to the people around her, so that she can then look down upon them.

The story’s ending suggests that Miss Strangeworth has been found out, and that her neighbors have taken revenge on her. Yet while Miss Strangeworth is shaken by the destruction of her rose garden—perhaps the most intimate form of revenge that her neighbors could exact—there is also a sense that she courted this sort of confrontation, and that something in her is gratified by it. After all, she is preoccupied throughout the story with the “wickedness of the world” (428) and does her best to turn her neighbors against one another. Even in turning against her, then, her neighbors are still doing her bidding, in confirming her worst ideas about them and her belief in her own blamelessness and righteousness.