ISU

The Bad Seed, by William March
ISU by Rebecca Ritchie
December 10, 2008

Christine Penmark is an accomplice to her murdering daughter’s activities by enabling her actions and assisting her in hiding the evidence of her murders, and ultimately she is as evil as her daughter. Could the “bad seed” be passed on from one generation to the next? In the novel The Bad Seed by William March, the character Christine Penmark is a young mother of an eight year old daughter named Rhoda. The Penmarks live in an apartment building and are friendly with the landlady Monica Breedlove who lives upstairs. Ms. Breedlove has an particular interest in psychology and is fascinated with the old-fashioned Rhoda. The apartment handyman Leroy is rude to all of the tenants except for Christine for whom he has a secret affection. Leroy is the one person Rhoda is not able to easily fool.
Christine Penmark is an anxious woman. She worries about her past. Her father, whom she loved deeply, died violently when she was young and her mother was ill for a long time with a heart condition. She felt disconnected from her family, believing she was adopted. Now a mother herself, she feels uneasy about her daughter and finds something strange about her.
(March 26) “Mrs.Penmark said that she was, adding that the child, almost from babyhood, had been something of a riddle both to herself and her husband. It was a thing difficult to isolate, or identify, but there was a strangely mature quality in the child’s character which they found disturbing.”
(March 36) “There had always been something strange about the child, but they had ignored her oddities, hoping she would become more like other children in time, although this had not happened; then, when she was six and they were living in Baltimore, they entered into a progressive school which was widely recommended; but a year later the principal of the school asked that the child be removed.”
Christine’s fears are confirmed when the school psychiatrist describes Rhoda as,
(March 37) “...the most precocious child he’d every seen; her quality of shrewd, mature calculation was remarkable indeed; she had none of the guilts and none of the anxieties of childhood; and of course she had no capacity of affection, either, being concerned only with herself. But perhaps the thing that was most remarkable about her was her unending acquisitiveness. She was like a charming little animal that can never be trained to fit into the conventional patters of existence...”
Christine wishes her daughter had different characteristics. She is lonely and wishes she and her daughter had a warmer relationship.
(March 27 “Mrs. Penmark sighed, raised her hands with humorous exaggeration and said “Sometimes I wish she were more dependent on others, Sometimes I wish she were less practical and more affectionate.”)
Christine is a doting mother and is shocked when she learns of her daughter’s crimes. Her protective nature leads her to hide or destroy the evidence of Rhoda’s crimes.
(March 114) “Christine went to the end of the wharf, and stood there in indecision, then, knowing why she wanted to visit this place alone, she opened her bag, took out the penmanship medal, and dropped it among the pilings. In a way, she was as guilty as Rhoda, she thought.”
Then she justifies her actions.
(March 114) “Rhoda is my own flesh and blood. It’s my duty to see that she isn’t harmed.”
As the story continues, Christine’s awareness of her daughters true character changes from feeling her child is simply unusual to realizing what her child is capable of doing.
(March 137) “She had wanted to assuage her doubts, to know the truth–and now she did know. What she’d dreaded in fantasy so long, she faced at last in unalterable reality.”
Rhoda’s confession to Christine about her murder of the old lady in Baltimore gives Christine another example of what her daughter is capable of. And it requires Christine to decide how she will manage this information again. Each time she lies and hides the evidence of her daughter’s actions makes it harder to tell the truth.
(March 138) “ How did you manage it with the old lady in Baltimore? I know so much now, another thing won’t matter greatly.” And Rhoda, sure of her triumph, smiled and said meekly, “I shoved her, Mother. I shoved her a little.”
When her child had gone, she went to her bathroom, her purpose not clear in her mind; she stood there in indecision, but seeing her reflection in the mirror, she pointed her finger at her image and laughed shrilly. Then, resting her head against the glass, her arms hanging limply at her sides, she knew she must live with her secret as best she could; she must optimistically hope for the best.”
When Christine finds Rhoda trying to get rid of her shoes, she questions Rhoda directly and learns that her daughter has killed a boy from school. She is confused as to what to do and unable to make a decision. What she does know is that she will protect Rhoda.
(March 137) “Nobody will hurt you. I don’t know what must be done now, but I promise you nobody will hurt you.”
Her guilt and feelings of responsibility for what Rhoda has become lead her to make the decision to destroy the bloody shoes.
(March 141) “In sudden panic, she called Rhoda in from the park; and when the child stood before her , she said harshly, ‘Take the shoes and put them in the incinerator!’ The child moved away to obey her, and Christine called out in a shrill, agonized voice, ‘Hurry! Hurry, Rhoda! Put them in the incinerator! Burn then quickly!’ She stood beside her door, watching while the little girl when down the hall, lowered the chute, and dropped the bloodstained shoes into the furnace below”.
Christine stands up for Rhoda and makes excuses for her actions with other people. She imagines that Rhoda has feelings of remorse. It becomes clear that Rhoda feels nothing, and Christine has trouble understanding this.
(March 49) “Later Christine came into the room and put the sandwich and milk on the table. Her face was still puzzled, her brows puckered a little. She said ‘Just the same, it was an unfortunate thing to see and remember.’ She kissed the child on the top of her head, and continued. ‘I understand how you really feel, my darling.’ Rhoda moved a bit of her puzzle into its proper place on the board; then, looking up, she said in a surprised voice, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mother. I don’t feel any way at all.”
Christine keeps these incidents from her husband. When their little white terrier puppy suddenly dies, she is aware that Rhoda is to blame but she tells her husband that the dog must have had something wrong with it at birth.
(March 67) “Christine had heard the dying whimpering of the dog, and going into her daughter’s room, she had seen Rhoda leaning out of the window, dispassionately watching some object below. She had joined her daughter, and there, three stories below, was the little terrier with its spine crushed. She said, ‘What happened? What happened to the dog?’ But Rhoda had walked away as though the matter concerned her not at all. At the door she pushed and said, ‘ It fell out of the window, I think’.” Christine wrestles with the decision to keep her daughter’s actions to herself or have her institutionalized.
(March 145) “The more she considered matters as they were, the less she could see how any benefit could be had from the child’s exposure at this time.”
Christine Penmark eventually discovers that she is the biological daughter of a well-known serial killer. This knowledge increases her guilt and sense of responsibility for what Rhoda has become, the genetic “bad seed” has been passed down through the generations and Christine knows that Rhoda will kill again and that, again, she will protect her. She decides to give Rhoda an overdose of sleeping pills and then commit suicide with a gunshot to the head. The child’s death was much harder then her own.
(March 211) “ She considered and discarded several plans to get the child to take her death potion without suspicion or anxiety; and at last, to lend normal credibility to her design, she took the little girl to a doctor for an examination. The child’s appetite was not good; she’d seemed listless and pale of late; she wondered if there were anything the matter with her. The doctor examined the little girl, and later, when he was alone with Mrs. Penmark, he said her daughter was as healthy as a child could be.
On their way home, Christine said ‘ The doctor thinks you need vitamin tablets. We’ll stop here and get them.’
She brought the tablets in the child’s presence. Later, she took the tablets from their container and substituted the sleeping pills. That night when Rhoda was in bed, she said, ‘ I suppose you may as well take the tablets now. This is a good a time as any’. But when Rhoda saw the number of the tablets her mother has measured in her palm, she said, ‘ You don’t take all those at one time, do you?’ ‘ I asked the doctor that. I didn’t know, either. He said you usually took them one at a time, after meals; but your condition was a little different, and he thought it better to take them all at once.’ Rhoda said ‘ Let’s see the bottle, Mother.’
Mrs.Penmark gave her the bottle, and after the child had examined it, read the label, and verified that fact that the tablets in her mother’s hand were identical with those still in the bottle, she said ‘ Well, all right, Mother,’ and took the first of the pills.
After each tablet, she took a small swallow of water; and Christine said, ‘ These will make a difference. They’ll solve everything for you.... Now, you must take them every one. There are only a few left, now. You must try and take them all.’ Then, when the child had swallowed the last of the sleeping tablets, Christine sat beside her. ‘ Do you want me to read to you?’ she asked. The child nodded. She was in the middle of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and her mother, finding the proper place, read softly. She thought the child would never sleep; she wondered how long she could keep up her manner of deceptive calmness; then, after a long time, the eyes of the child inevitably closed.”
Christine’s death was quicker and was less emotional. It is uncomplicated and without hesitation. The pistol, which has been referred to often throughout the book, is now in play. Her final plan of murder/suicide is motivated by guilt and responsibility. She must protect Rhoda from being discovered as a murderer.
(March 213) “She is not going to destroy you, as she’s destroyed me. And she’s not going to die publicly as my mother did, with millions reading of her last words, her last thoughts, her last gestures of pain, with their morning coffee. That is not going to happen, That can never happen now.”
(March 213) “ She kissed the child once on her brow. She unlocked the drawer of her desk for a final time. She stood with the pistol in her hand, inspecting it idly, as though she did not understand its purpose. And then, standing before the mirror in her bedroom, she raised the pistol and put a bullet through her brain”.
Early in the story, Christine overhears a conversation between two men on the street while she is waiting for Mrs. Breedlove. The topic of their conversation is anxiety and violence and Christine considers what she has heard seriously. After some though she comes to the realization that violence in life is necessary. That without violence there is no kindness, compassion or even love.
(March 30) “ ‘If anyone asks me, I’d say the age we live in is an age of violence. It looks to me like violence is in everybody’s mind these days. It looks like we’re just going to keep on until there’s nothing left to ruin. If you stop and think about it, it scares you.’
‘ Well, maybe we live in an age of anxiety and violence.’
‘Now, that sounds more like it. Come to think about it, I guess that’s what our age is really like.’
They shook hands, made a date to meet for lunch the following week, and walked toward their beckoning wives, while Mrs.Penmark stood quietly, turning over in her mind the things she had heard. It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all–an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself.”