Miss Strangeworth In The Possibility Of Evil By Shirley Jackson

“The Possibility of Evil” is a story about a strange woman named Miss Strangeworth. Her life is about thinking of all the bad in the world and writing anonymous letters to fix it. In “The Possibility of Evil”, by Shirley Jackson, the author uses dialogue, symbolism, and inner thinking to show how Miss Strangeworth thinks of evil in the world.
Jackson uses dialogue to illustrate what the townspeople think of Miss Strangeworth, raising the stakes if Miss Strangeworth ever gets found out. The townspeople act very nice when they talk to Miss Strangeworth. This shows that the townspeople may not know what Miss Strangeworth does in her free time. This is important because she to deal with someone knowing she is sending her letters at the end. In the text, the Harris boy says, “She dropped a letter addressed to Don Crane. Might as well take it on over.” This shows that the Harris boy doesn’t know that the letter is a letter that stops evil. This is important because in the morning, Miss Strangeworth realises someone figured she was sending the letters. The author tries to do other things to make the story more interesting.

The smell of the roses soothe Miss Strangeworth when she writes her letters. This shows that the roses let her continue working on her letters peacefully. This is important because if she didn’t have the roses, she might've stopped working on her letters and realise how bad they were. Also, at the end, the text states in a letter back to Miss Strangeworth, “LOOK OUT AT WHAT USED TO BE YOUR ROSES”. This shows that Miss Strangeworth has grown too attached to the roses and now she seems to not care about anything but them. This is important because if her motivation is “injured”, then she won’t realise that she has been hurting more people than them hurting her roses. There is one more thing that makes the story