Examine Shirley Jackson's use of setting in her short story, "The Possibility of Evil."

Miss Adela Strangeworth cannot stand anything other than absolute perfection and order, and she is constantly on the lookout of any lack of it. Though Miss Strangeworth is outwardly friendly and proper to everyone she encounters, she is in reality examining them for possible flaws. She is herself is a dainty, sweet looking, and perfectly kept woman. She has never spent more than a single day of her 71 years outside her little town. She lives in a perfectly ordered home, the very first house on Pleasant Street, built by her grandfather. The Strangeworth family has lived in this house for more than 100 years. Adela feels that were it not for her grandfather, “there wouldn’t have been a town here at all” (157).  Because of this, she feels a huge sense of ownership over the town: “This was, after all, her town, and these were her people” (165). As the last living Strangeworth, she feels it is her duty to morally preserve the town. Therefore, Adela makes it her business to know what is going on and all her conversations are to this end.

The author gives us plenty of clues along the way to some deeper evil lurking in this sunny little place. We have a sense that things are not as they seem. Many of the townspeople look worried, ill, or unkept. Also, although Jackson takes great pains to give us a sense of a close-knit, little community, Miss Strangeworth locks her doors in a contrasting act of mistrust. And, though she is outwardly a gracious and caring person, Adela is reluctant to share her beautiful roses with any of the townspeople. She feels her roses belong on only Pleasant Street, where they have always been, and that those who might ask for them are being simply rude and lack understanding of her roses as an important symbol of the town’s purity and perfection. In Miss Strangeworth’s mind, she is the only one deserving of such purity and perfection. She hoards their lovely scent to herself, putting bowls of them all over her own house. We begin to see that something is not quite right about this woman. When we learn of Miss Strangeworth’s vile and hateful letters and how long she has been writing them, “sometimes two or three every day for a week, sometimes no more than one in a month – for the past year” (163), the true possibility of evil is fully revealed to us, contrasted nicely in the form of what appears to be a sweet old woman in a sunny and pleasant small town.  

        Adela Strangeworth believes she is fighting the possibility of evil that exists and is just waiting to reveal itself in all humans. If she can nip this potential for evil in the bud, so to speak, she will have done her duty of preserving the perfect, ordered sanctity of her small town. However, she ironically displays the very evil nature that she seeks to eradicate. She knows in her heart that her letters are morally wrong because she is so secretive about them. She keeps her desk locked up, makes her letters anonymous, and burns all drafts. Adela doesn’t care about the truth: “Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion” (162). She feels fully entitled to use real evil to fight perceived evil. In this way, I don’t feel the author is at all sympathetic to the main character or portrays her as well-intentioned. Miss Strangeworth does not feel any remorse over her evil acts of letter writing and their affect on her victims; on the contrary, she “awakened the next morning with a feeling of intense happiness and, for a minute wondered why, and then remembered that this morning three people would open her letters” (167). One would think that after an entire year of writing hateful letters to the very townspeople she feels responsible for morally saving, that their worried faces might begin to bother her, even just a little. But Miss Strangeworth does not seem bothered at all. She likes writing her letters and would outright lie if asked if she wrote such trash. She is so completely convinced of her righteousness superiority that she either doesn’t recognize herself as the cause of all the worry and unrest in the townsfolk, or she simply doesn’t care. Her end justifies her means. Thus, when she is exposed as the nasty letter writer and someone in turn anonymously destroys her lovely and perfect roses, we feel she deserves exactly what she gets. Adela has brought this retribution upon herself. The wickedness of the world that she cries silently about at the end of the story is the very same wickedness that she incubates and breeds within herself. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone like that, even if she is a little old lady.