The Possibility of Evil quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary genres best describe “The Possibility of Evil”?

   • Romance & Domestic Comedy
   • Correct answer: Suspense & Psychological Fiction
   • Fantasy & Fairy Tale
   • Historical Fiction & Wartime Story
   • Science Fiction & Dystopian

   Suspense & Psychological Fiction is exactly right. Jackson lets us inside the mind of a woman who is sure she is doing good, and the tension is whether her secret will catch up with her.

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2. 2

   Question 2. Where and when does “The Possibility of Evil” take place?

   • A crowded city apartment block on a rainy winter Sunday
   • A seaside resort town during the busy tourist season
   • Correct answer: An unnamed small town on a fresh, sunny summer Tuesday
   • A farming village in the week after a destructive flood

   The story opens on Main Street the morning after a heavy rain, when the whole town looks washed and bright. It is a Tuesday, the day Miss Strangeworth always buys her tea. Jackson names Main Street and Pleasant Street but never names the town or the state.

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3. 3

   Question 3. Mr. Lewis looks tired and forgets her Tuesday tea. What suspicion did one of Miss Strangeworth's letters plant in his mind?

   • Correct answer: That his grandson might be taking petty cash from the register
   • That his wife was planning to sell the grocery without him
   • That Arthur Parker was cheating him on the price of strawberries
   • That the new post office would draw his customers away

   The narrator says Mr. Lewis would never have imagined his grandson “might be lifting petty cash from the store register” without one of her letters. Jackson never connects this to his mood at the counter in so many words; the reader makes the link that Miss Strangeworth never does.

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4. 4

   Question 4. How old is Miss Strangeworth?

   • Sixty-one
   • Correct answer: Seventy-one
   • Eighty-one
   • Seventy-six

   She tells tourists she is seventy-one and has never spent more than a day outside the town in her whole life. The next morning the narrator notes that her teeth are still sound in spite of her seventy-one years.

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5. 5

   Question 5. Why does Miss Strangeworth never give away any of her roses, even when tourists ask?

   • She is saving every bloom to win the county flower show
   • Her doctor has warned her that cutting them strains her heart
   • She promised her mother on her deathbed never to cut them
   • Correct answer: It bothers her to think of them carried off to strange towns

   “The roses belonged on Pleasant Street,” and she dislikes the idea of people taking them “into strange towns and down strange streets.” When the church needs flowers for the new minister, she sends gladioli instead. The roses stand for her family, her house and her sense that the town belongs to her.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Why does the colored notepaper help keep Miss Strangeworth's letters anonymous?

   • She buys it in a distant city where no one knows her face
   • Correct answer: Everyone in town buys the same pad for notes and lists
   • The ink she uses on it fades away after a single reading
   • She takes it from the library so it will point to Miss Chandler

   Her own stationery is heavy cream paper engraved “Strangeworth House,” but for her other letters she uses the pink, green, blue and yellow pad from the local newspaper shop, which everyone in town uses for notes, recipes and lunch-box cookies. She also prints in pencil in a childish block print and never signs her name.

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7. 7

   Question 7. What does Miss Strangeworth always buy on Tuesday, which Mr. Lewis forgets to remind her about?

   • A pound of sugar
   • A small jar of honey
   • A loaf of fresh bread
   • Correct answer: A quarter pound of tea

   “It's Tuesday, Mr. Lewis. You forgot to remind me,” she says, and orders a quarter pound of tea. The sugar belongs to Mrs. Harper, who has run out for her cake frosting and whose hand shakes as she pays.

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8. 8

   Question 8. How does the pink letter to Don Crane use what Helen Crane told Miss Strangeworth that morning?

   • It congratulates the Cranes on how quickly their daughter is growing
   • It warns the Cranes that the town thinks they spoil the baby
   • Correct answer: It turns Helen's private worry about her baby into a cruel taunt
   • It asks Don Crane to repay money that Helen had borrowed

   Helen confides that the baby “just seems—slow,” and Miss Strangeworth tells her it is nonsense. At home she prints a letter calling the baby an idiot child and suggesting some people shouldn't have children. She addresses it to Don, wondering whether he will show it to his wife.

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9. 9

   Question 9. The narrator says her letters “dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion.” What does this reveal?

   • Correct answer: She writes about what might be true, not about what she knows
   • She checks every rumor carefully with witnesses before writing
   • She writes only about crimes that she has seen with her own eyes
   • She copies her accusations from gossip in the local newspaper

   “Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts.” She would be shocked if there were really anything between Linda Stewart and the Harris boy, yet she wrote the letter anyway. Suspicion needs no proof, and it does its damage whether or not it is true.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What does "Dramatic Irony" mean in this story?

    • When a character says the opposite of what she really means
    • When a writer gives human feelings to an object or an animal
    • Correct answer: When the reader knows something that a character fails to see
    • When a story jumps back in time to show an earlier event

    Linda tells Dave her father has forbidden him the house, and Miss Strangeworth thinks, “There was so much evil in people.” We know her own letter caused the heartbreak she is listening to. She even wonders whether a letter to the Harris boy's father might help.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What does the title, “The Possibility of Evil,” point to in Miss Strangeworth's thinking?

    • It names a secret crime that someone in town really did commit
    • It refers to a sermon given by the new minister at the church
    • It is the name of the bridge club where the gossip begins
    • Correct answer: It describes the mere chance of wrongdoing she treats as fact

    She believes that without her letters her neighbors would go on “never aware of possible evil lurking nearby.” She does not deal in proven evil, only in the possibility of it, and the possibility is enough for her to wreck a family's peace. The title also hints at a second possibility: the evil in the letter-writer herself.

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12. 12

    Question 12. What does Miss Strangeworth write her anonymous letters with?

    • Correct answer: A dull stub of pencil
    • Her grandfather's quill
    • Her father's gold pen
    • A borrowed typewriter

    Her desk holds her grandfather's trimmed quill pen and her father's fountain pen, but for these letters she always uses “a dull stub of pencil” and prints in a childish block print. The family pens stay in the desk; the anonymous letters get the plainest tool in the house.

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13. 13

    Question 13. Why does Miss Strangeworth never sign her letters?

    • She fears the police would arrest her if they learned the truth
    • Correct answer: She thinks her honored family name should not be on such trash
    • She wants the town to believe the letters come from Mr. Lewis
    • She plans to reveal herself after the letters have done their work

    If asked, she would say her name, honored in the town for so many years, “did not belong on such trash.” The irony is sharp: she calls her own letters trash and still believes she is keeping the town clean. She also admits something simpler: she liked writing her letters.

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14. 14

    Question 14. What goes wrong when Miss Strangeworth mails her letters that evening?

    • All three letters drop through, and the Harris boy sees her post them
    • She mails the letters by day, when the post office is still open
    • Linda Stewart catches her at the slot and asks what she is mailing
    • Correct answer: Two letters fall inside, but the pink one lands on the ground outside

    The third letter catches on the edge of the slot and falls at her feet. She is busy wondering about a letter to the Harris boy's father, and she never hears him call out that she has dropped something. “Old lady Strangeworth's getting deaf,” he says, holding the pink envelope addressed to Don Crane.

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15. 15

    Question 15. Why does the Harris boy take the dropped letter to the Cranes' house himself?

    • He suspects the letter is hers and wants the Cranes to catch her
    • Correct answer: He hopes it holds good news the Cranes might need that night
    • Linda begs him to take it so she can see Helen Crane's baby
    • He is paid a dime by the post office to deliver dropped mail

    Linda says to throw it in the post office and asks, “Why do anyone a favor?” Dave jokes that it might hold a check, then says, “Maybe they need something happy tonight, too. Like us.” His one act of kindness is what carries the cruelest of the three letters to its reader that very night.

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16. 16

    Question 16. What does "Situational Irony" mean in this story?

    • Correct answer: When events turn out the reverse of what we would expect
    • When a character speaks her private thoughts aloud on stage
    • When a writer exaggerates a detail far beyond the truth
    • When the same sound repeats at the start of nearby words

    Miss Strangeworth wakes happy because three people will open her letters that morning. Instead she is the one who finds an unsigned green envelope with penciled printing in her mail. The woman who sends anonymous letters receives one.

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17. 17

    Question 17. What does the green letter Miss Strangeworth receives the next morning tell her?

    • It tells her the whole town now knows who writes the letters
    • It warns her never to write another letter to the Crane family
    • Correct answer: It tells her to look out at what used to be her roses
    • It asks her to meet the writer at the post office at dusk

    The letter reads, “LOOK OUT AT WHAT USED TO BE YOUR ROSES,” and she begins to cry silently for the wickedness of the world. Jackson never says who sent it or who harmed the roses, and never shows the garden. Because Dave delivered the pink letter by hand, many readers infer it came from the Cranes, but that is an inference the story leaves to you.

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18. 18

    Question 18. What does "Symbol" mean in this story?

    • A comparison between two unlike things using the words like or as
    • A figure of speech that gives an object human emotions or actions
    • A long speech in which one character alone reveals inner thoughts
    • Correct answer: An object that stands for a larger idea beyond its literal meaning

    The roses stand for Miss Strangeworth's family pride, her perfect house and her belief that she owns the town. That is why the final letter aims at them. Whoever wrote it knew exactly where she could be hurt.

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19. 19

    Question 19. Which theme does Jackson build most carefully in “The Possibility of Evil”?

    • Correct answer: Evil can hide in people who are sure they are fighting it
    • Small towns are always safer places to live than big cities
    • Young people rarely show respect for the elders around them
    • Money and property decide who holds power in a community

    Miss Strangeworth believes “it was Miss Strangeworth's duty to keep her town alert” to evil, and she is sincere. Yet the fear, tears and broken friendships around town come from her pencil. The most respected woman in town is the source of the very evil she thinks she is guarding against.

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20. 20

    Question 20. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Miss Strangeworth tells tourists she has never spent more than a day outside the town.

      Happened

      It is one of her proudest boasts, along with her claim that her grandfather built the first house on Pleasant Street.

    • She sends a basket of her roses to decorate the church for the new minister.

      Didn't happen

      She sends a great basket of gladioli. The roses stay on Pleasant Street, set in bowls and vases inside her own house.

    • She stopped calling the grocer Tommy the day he went to work in the grocery.

      Happened

      They went to high school, picnics and dances together, but once he stood behind the counter he became Mr. Lewis, and she became Miss Strangeworth.

    • Mrs. Harper warmly thanks Miss Strangeworth for her concern about her health.

      Didn't happen

      Mrs. Harper answers shortly that she is perfectly all right and leaves without speaking again. She has already received some of Miss Strangeworth's letters.

    • When a letter has a mistake, she burns the page in her kitchen stove at once.

      Happened

      She is fond of doing things exactly right, so a badly spaced or mistaken page goes straight into the stove.

    • She signs each letter with her initials so the town will know it can trust her.

      Didn't happen

      She never signs her letters. She believes her honored name does not belong on them, and she never gets any answers.

    • She thinks of writing to the school board about Billy Moore's father's new convertible.

      Happened

      She wonders how a chemistry teacher can afford it, then decides she is tired of writing letters. The three she has done will do for one day.

    • All three of that day's letters drop safely through the post office mail slot.

      Didn't happen

      Two fall inside. The third, the pink letter addressed to Don Crane, catches on the edge and falls to the ground at her feet.

    • Linda tells Dave that her father has threatened to horsewhip him.

      Happened

      Linda says Dave is not to come near the house again. She will not tell him why, only that it is nasty.

    • The letter she receives the next morning is signed by Don Crane.

      Didn't happen

      It is unsigned, in a green envelope with penciled printing, just like her own letters. The story never says who sent it.

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