Mrs. Strangeworth In The Possibility Of Evil By Shirley Jackson

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In Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Possibility of Evil”, Mrs. Strangeworth shows the epitome of the human’s common trait to deny to associate oneself with the negative qualities within them. She does this by constantly regarding the townsmen as corrupt people that need her watching over them. The way she does this reveals corruptness as she sends passive-aggressive letters to “misbehaving” townspeople. The quote shows an attempt to justify her sending of manipulative letters. Starting with, “the town where she lived”, immediately separates her from the population of the town and puts Mrs. Strangeworth as a person above the town looking down. This gives her the ability to decide how everyone is perceived and how her qualities will be precepted, leaving her able to deny her internal bad qualities. Later the sentence further separates Mrs. Strangeworth from the purported wickedness of others utilizing the phrase, “people everywhere”. People excludes her, but includes everyone else. Everywhere is a broad term used to brush over all the people she later describes as evil. However, if she stopped looking at others so harshly and looked at her own actions to stop evil, she would see no longer be able to deny her own internal wrongdoing. …show more content…

Strangeworth’s opinion are “clean and sweet”. Clean means pure or unsoiled; yet, a pure town would not have nasty letters circling around. Along with that, sweet, meaning naive or kind, used in this context is contradicted by Mrs. Strangeworth's menacing letters wisely written to torment people with their suggestions. However, they still leave anonymity so she can deny her evil letters. Ironically this heinous behavior is exactly what she tries to prevent, but she cannot see her hypocritical actions and refuses to accept her responsibility in the town’s

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