Friday, October 12, 2007

Margaret's Group for October 17 Work

Post answers here for questions chosen for "The Possibility of Evil." Group members: Ken, Vicky and Tamu.
Posted by at

4 comments:

Ken J said...

revised my plot as following:
The story tells that Mrs. Strangeworth, a single seventy-one year old woman living alone in a huge house taking care of her roses. She lives as a noble princess in her house. Her family is the founder of this town. She is well behavior and known as a good old lady in front of all town folks. They don't know that she is the writer of anonymous notes to people lived in the small town. The notes she wrote shows "idiot child…,””Or is the wife really always the last to know?" She writes notes according to her suspicious on events. She doesn’t like to see someone have a happy life especially related to family. The notes always caused some conflicts or misunderstandings in this community. She enjoys of ruining other people’s life or just when she thinks of someone open her malicious notes will make her intense happiness. Until one day, Mrs. Strangeworth accidentally dropped one letter which picked up by two innocent teens suffered from her evil notes and deliver the letter to Mr. Cranes.
The story ends with Mrs. Strangeworth herself opening a note similar to the ones she has sent others, saying "LOOK OUT AT WHAT USED TO BE YOUR ROSES". She begins to cry silently for the wickedness of the world. Someone might seek revenge because of her wickedness.

October 15, 2007 at 1:26 AM
Margaret said...

Is there a relationship between place and charcter? What significance do you find in the roses described throughout the story?

In the story “Possibility of Evil”, Shirley Jackson describes the setting in sensuous details, to emphasize the influence the main character has on the story. She illustrates some of the face of evil and possible environment he/she might lives in. For example, Miss Strangeworth, an elderly women,who lives in a small and quite town. As a descendant of the first settlers, she takes care of her heritage, especially the front yard roses. She is respected well-known figure in town. Although everything in her life looks perfectly “neat”, ”washed”, ”sparkled”, and “shining”, people don’t know about her shadowed side she plays behind closed doors. Miss Strangeworth writes anonymous letters toward her towns folks, to keep the town “clean and sweet.” Unfortunately, her anonymity comes to light and in revenge, people damage her roses. I think that Jackson compares Miss Strangeworth to the roses. The perfect beauty, sweet fragranced, and subtle structured outside, but with the thorns ,that may hurt, hidden behind the leaves.

October 15, 2007 at 4:58 PM
vic''ky said...

What’s the theme?
Miss Strangeworth thinks she is the only perfect person in her town and she has a purest heart. However, she is two-faced and she is the evilest person. She is pretending to be nice to everyone and doing bad things under the table. She gets the same wicked things which she did to people. If you want to be a justicer, you are supposed to tell the truth in a right way.

October 16, 2007 at 11:17 PM
Victoria said...

Society will never eliminate the evil for the reason that evil is stronger than good. Evil can betray, can kill, can hurt physically or emotionally others in that its advantage over the good.
To fight evil completely good has to use its own (evil) methods, but they go against principles of good. From another hand, do we need to eliminate evil? In the nature everything is balanced. The balance will be breached if the evil doesn’t exist. To control global issues such as evil and good we must have a very powerful controller to control our actions as well as our minds. Or maybe we already have one and everything is under His control.

November 7, 2007 at 9:58 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)