The Possibility of Evil by Shirley Jackson
Adela Strangeworth, the seventy-one-year-old protagonist in Jackson’s 1965 short story, has a gripe with evil, which is really to say anything that could upset the delicate balance in the social ecosystem of a town she reminds us was built by her grandfather around a lumber mill. She is proud of her ancestry and carries herself as such: the single remaining descendant of an admirable line of Strangeworths responsible for keeping order by proclaiming inconvenient assumptions about her fellow denizens no matter how hurtful or destructive. She writes and sends anonymous letters with no filter. The lovely roses she cultivates – she insists they remain in town. She is unapologetic throughout. The well-being and integrity of the town, she maintains, needs this sort of ruthless heavy-handedness, secret though it may be.
Adela Strangeworth reveals hidden infidelities, suggests those with so-called “idiot” children should not have had them in the first place, and maligns physicians she suspects of performing unnecessary procedures just for the money. On colored stationary, she holds no punches, believing that her brutal honesty best cuts to the heart of things, allowing those involved the ability to make sincere amends.
If only ...
She is eventually found out and receives a nasty note of her own, detailing in terse language how her prized roses have been destroyed.
The ending would remain a just irony if Strangeworth’s curious practice did not mirror similar practices in social media today. How many times has an anonymous author sniped at someone with mean and uncaring language? We might be tempted to believe that this is a sign of the sickness of our times were it not for the fact that Jackson’s work came out almost sixty years ago. Was she anticipating a development in our social behavior? Was her critical gaze set squarely on a rising trend in how human beings interact with other human beings? Perhaps so. The world of 1965 was still a world of fracturing morality and emerging relativism. The veneer of niceness was wearing off, and folks were more prone to act out. Riot. Assassinate. Reject with unmasked disdain any institution’s claim to authority.
Adela Strangeworth fancied herself an authority of the town to the extent that she could call out people’s faults with impunity. She was wrong. They called her out in kind. Even the fragrant symbols of the town’s upstanding past – the roses -- were fair game. Nothing was sacred. Everything was profane.
Is this how we regard ourselves now on social media? Has the platform simply grown from one old woman’s letters to a field of millions all vying to put each other in their place? To be sure, is this what Jackson means by evil? We allow ourselves to become gods of our towns, gods of whatever social media platform and, as such, we give ourselves permission to judge, to condemn.
We eat each other alive with haughty looks and wonder why there is so much hatred in the world.
Jackson saw it coming. The only question that remains is what becomes the target after civility, after politeness, after the roses: these pretty symbols of what may have never existed in the first place.
