Minnie Eldridge

Minnie Eldridge is the postmistress of Amity, a position she has held for as long as anyone can remember. She is small and frail-looking but deceptively strong, able to hustle packages and cartons nearly as quickly as the two young men who work with her. She never speaks about her past or her private life, though it is known she was born on Nantucket Island and left sometime soon after World War I. She considers herself not only a native but also the resident expert on the history of the town, needing no prodding to embark on a discourse about Amity's eponym, a seventeenth-century woman named Amity Hopewell who was convicted of witchcraft, or to recite the list of major events in the town's past, including the landing of British troops during the Revolution, the fire of 1823, the wreck of a rumrunning ship in 1921, the hurricane of 1938, and the landing of three German spies on the Scotch Road beach in 1942.

Role as Postmistress and Social Arbiter

The post office is a small, square building on Teal Street, just off Main, with 500 mailboxes, 340 of which are rented to Amity's permanent residents. The other 160 are allotted to summer people according to Minnie's whims. Those she likes are permitted to rent boxes for the summer; those she doesn't like must wait in line at the counter. She refuses to rent a box to any summer person on a year-round basis, so summer people never know from one year to the next whether they will have a mailbox when they arrive in June. Minnie makes Ellen Brody nervous, and Ellen senses that Minnie does not like her. Minnie feels uneasy with Ellen because she cannot catalogue her: Ellen is neither summer folk nor winter folk, having earned her year-round mailbox not by birth but by marriage.

Prophetic Voice and Moral Commentary

Minnie Eldridge provides a stark, biblical counterpoint to the town's secular and economic panic over the shark attacks. When Ellen Brody visits the post office and says she guesses the authorities will try to catch the shark, Minnie responds by quoting the Book of Job: "Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?" She declares, "No mortal man's going to catch that fish," and explains, "We're not meant to catch it, that's why. We're being readied." When Ellen asks for what, Minnie replies, "We'll know when the time comes." Later, as Brody and others struggle with the crisis, Harry Meadows recalls Minnie's pronouncement, and Brody admits, "I'm beginning to think she may have something, after all." Minnie's view that the shark is an instrument of divine will or punishment stands as a persistent, unsettling alternative to the rational explanations offered by science and the desperate calculations of commerce.