A Possibility Of Evil Response

 Overall, I really enjoyed reading “A Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson and I would definitely read another one of Jackson’s stories.

I thought the writing of the story was very interesting. Jackson described the town, as a perfect, tight-knit little community, with the story centered around one sweet old lady. At first I liked Miss Strangeworth, but then I learned more about her. She was very possessive of the town and definitely status-obsessed. She loved to point out how long her family had been in town and was very proud of her roses. I believe that she had OCD tendencies. She very much liked order and did the same thing constantly – even bought her tea every week on the same day! Even though she seemed extremely weird from the get-go, I actually thought that she would end up being the victim in this story. I figured that “A Possibility of Evil” would be some sort of sick and twisted old woman massacre.

            In a community so perfect, it seems as though nothing could go wrong. That is why I extremely surprised when granny ended up being the person behind the hate mail. I found it extremely ironic that she thought her hate mail would help protect the community from evil, when in fact she was the evil.

            I thought that the ending was a bit predictable. Throughout the entire story, Miss Strangeworth’s roses were a big part of her life, and everyone knew it. Once people found out that she was sending the hate mail, of course they went after her roses. They were her pride and joy, and cutting them would hurt her more than any other form of revenge. When she started crying, I actually felt rather bad for her. Did she deserve it? Yes, but she was only trying to help. If only she had thought for a moment about her actions and realized that she was hurting more people than she was helping.

            Moral of the story: old people are weird.