Neighbor Monica Breedlove is a wonderful grotesque. What causes a child to grow up without developing empathy? Is it possible for them to learn these emotional skills and have healthy relationships with others, or are such children doomed for life? Safe to say, the solution proposed by author William March in the case of little Rhoda should not be applied to the general population.Īlthough Rhoda’s father is working overseas, she has a number of adults in her life, both loving and otherwise. The issues raised by the novel are still timely.
It’s a controversial topic even today, so this book was hugely shocking in the 1950s, a period which idealized childhood and family life. The Bad Seed tackles the difficult question of what to do with child psychopaths. Christine Penmark starts to wonder whether her little girl is quite as innocent as she looks… When Claude drowns during a school picnic, Rhoda takes her first experience of death a little too calmly. She doesn’t get along with children her own age, however, especially classmate Claude Daigle, who wins a prize Rhoda has her heart set on. Unfailingly polite and diligent, the “old-fashioned” young girl is doted on by adults. Little Rhoda Penmark isn’t like other children.
A caustic entertainment, in which March, along with his little fiend, consummates more than one kind of wicked retaliation.“Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who were going to make great names for themselves, usually started in childhood they showed their genius early, just as outstanding poets, mathematicians, and musicians did.”
Penmark decides to handle the situation herself, and as she fails- the book ends on a note of ironic horror. When she is unable to stop still another murder-committed before her very eyes, Mrs. Penmark's disbelief is finally overcome, along with the reader's, and she turns to case histories- and family records- to discover that she was adopted and that her real mother was a notorious and successful killer, and that her daughter's homicidal impulse is inherited. William March' virulent talent is thoroughly at ease in a quietly horrifying little story in which Christine Penmark, an average, pleasant woman, alone while her husband is on a protracted business trip, discovers that their eight-year old daughter is a budding mass murderesses, with already two successes to her credit and no qualms about either one.
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