The Possibility of Evil: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Miss Strangeworth is seventy-one, the last of her family, and lives in the house her grandfather built on Pleasant Street. She knows everyone in town and considers herself the town's protector. She grows prize roses that she never gives away. On her afternoon walk, she exchanges pleasantries with neighbours while privately noting the 'evil' she sees beneath the surface of their lives.

Rising action

At home, Miss Strangeworth writes her letters — on coloured notepaper in a disguised handwriting — addressing the fears and suspicions she has accumulated. She mails them at the post office drop. On her way home, she drops one by accident. A young couple — Don and Helen Crane, whose baby she had hinted might be mentally disabled — see it fall and pick it up intending to mail it for her. They read the name on the envelope and, deciding to do her a favour, mail it. Later that evening, Miss Strangeworth falls asleep satisfied.

Ending

The next morning a letter arrives for Miss Strangeworth — the first she has ever received on her own street. It informs her that her roses have been destroyed overnight. She drops the letter and runs to the window. The roses are gone.

Miss Strangeworth

Miss Strangeworth's self-image is of benevolent guardianship: she watches over the town as her family has always done, protecting it from evil. Her letters are, in her own view, a public service. Jackson shows the reader — through the specific contents of the letters — that what Miss Strangeworth actually does is plant fear and suspicion where it did not exist before. She creates the evil she claims to be fighting. The roses, which she prizes but never shares, are the symbol of her self-satisfaction: beautiful in her own eyes, withheld from everyone else.

The town

Pleasant Street and its residents are Jackson's study in the gap between a community's surface pleasantness and its interior life. The letters work because they speak to anxieties that already exist; Miss Strangeworth does not invent the fears but amplifies them. Like The Lottery, the story argues that ordinary community life contains the mechanisms of cruelty.

Evil in the ordinary

Miss Strangeworth's evil is banal — anonymous letters typed on pink and green notepaper, mailed in envelopes she buys at the drugstore. Jackson's point is that evil does not require dramatic intention or obvious malice. Miss Strangeworth believes she is good; the harm she causes is real. The title's 'possibility of evil' refers to what she perceives in others, but the story argues that the possibility of evil is Miss Strangeworth herself.

The roses and retribution

Miss Strangeworth's roses are her identity — three generations of the family have grown them, they are the finest in town, they have won prizes. She never cuts them for others. The destruction of the roses is the community's retribution: what she most values, taken in exchange for what she destroyed in others (peace of mind, trust, domestic happiness). Jackson makes the retribution proportionate and immediate, which is unusual for her — The Lottery's violence is random; here the punishment is targeted.