As an eccentric woman with an overstated sense of personal
responsibility toward her townspeople, Mrs. Strangeworth believes that she has the
ability to control the town that views her as a sort of matriarch due to the long family
history of the woman.
Acting like some form of vigilante,
Strangeworth erroneously concludes that, in order to keep the town in check, she should
provoke situations by sending anonymous letters to neighbors. These letters put people
at odds with each other, provoking the exact behaviors that she claims to want to avert:
disdain, hatred, repudiation, lies, and much more. Strangeworth has a twisted mind in
the sense that, while she has a good rationale in trying to avert "evil" in town, she is
using the most crass methods possible, which lead to the opposite of what should be
accomplished.
Mr. Lewis would never have imagined for a minute
that his grandson might be lifting petty cash from the store register if he had not had
one of Miss Strangeworth's letters.
That is the ironic tragedy.
Even when she is caught as the writer of the letters, and the people take vengeance by
destroying her garden, she sees that act as the "really" bad thing, and not what she did
to the others.
Miss Chandler, the librarian, and Linda
Stewart's parents would have gone unsuspectingly ahead with their lives, never aware of
possible evil lurking nearby, if Miss Strangeworth had not sent letters opening their
eyes
We could argue that she
succeeds at causing havoc in the lives of others, whether that is what she was doing in
her mind or not. She also succeeds at planting doubt and
discord.
Yet, she also wanted to avoid all of that. She
viewed her actions as necessary and did not measure the collateral damage that was being
caused. In that sense, she did not succeed at averting the evil, but she did succeed at
thinking that she may have.
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