The Bad Seed

Company K

Come in at the Door

The Little Wife and Other Stories

The Tallons

Some Like Them Short

The Looking-Glass

Trial Balance

October Island

The Bad Seed

I suppose if a novelist is going to imagine and give life to a character meant to be a memorable but also totally unexpected serial killer, it makes sense that he make her not only a young child but also a girl. Though readers may be more familiar with Macaulay Culkin’s apple-cheeked child psycho in 1993’s
The Good Son
, the grade-school sociopath to which all contemporary child killers can, and should, be compared is Rhoda Penmark, the focus of William March’s 1954 bestselling novel,
The Bad Seed.
Eight years old, with straight brown hair and a desire for tidiness that seems to border on the obsessive, Rhoda boasts an old-fashioned name and a stereotypically feminine, highly controlled style of dress and disposition that seem to be at extreme odds with her willingness to, for example, toss terrier puppies to their deaths from bedroom windows. And she’s driving her mother, the overly cautious housewife Christine Penmark, literally crazy.

Of course, it’s not just animals who invoke the wrath of Rhoda P., Kid Creep: Children and adults alike are subject to her special form of homicidal dispensation, giving lie to the nineteenth-century nursery rhyme that little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” Indeed, it’s likely that part of what made
The Bad Seed
so terrifying and unsettling to midcentury American readers is author William March’s juxtaposition of the younger Penmark’s external performance of obedient, coquettish femininity—“Oh, my old-fashioned little darling!” exclaims one of Rhoda’s admirers, her neighbor Monica Breedlove, early on in the text—with what are commonly thought to be more masculine traits: the covetousness, ruthlessness, and lack of control that inspire most of her calculated crimes of convenience. This dissonance between how Rhoda appears on the outside and who she is on the inside is further underscored by her aforementioned appearance, all pressed dotted-Swiss dresses and trimmed bangs and perfectly twisted pigtails.

About those pigtails. In the film version of the book, released in 1956, Mr. March’s Rhoda, she of the “straight, finespun, and … dark, dull brown” hair, is reimagined as a towheaded terror in the form of actress Patty McCormack, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. Director Mervyn LeRoy’s choice to take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and make the celluloid Rhoda a blonde served to accentuate not just the character’s iciness but to communicate a certain innocence and fragility, making her appear more like a doll than a flesh-and-blood human being. Indeed, the film version feels prescient in the ways that it seems to presage and anticipate any number of scary killer dolls from cinematic history, including the braided moppets from the 1963
Twilight Zone
episode “Living Doll” and 2013’s paranormal thriller
The Conjuring.
Descriptions of Rhoda’s appearance and countenance in the book reinforce this: She walks stiffly and somewhat carefully; her hair is arranged in the sort of perfectly ordered, taut plaits that only a factory assembly line could produce; and she seems to be capable of two, maybe three expressions—blank solemnity, irresistible cuteness, and flashing anger.

Though not exactly a character study, it’s possible that William March’s criminalizing of a young female was supposed to be both provocative and maybe even political, that in making an adorable little girl an ice-cold killer somehow our ideas of femininity and decorum and preciousness were going to be upended, and violently. (It was the mid-1950s, after all, a time in which expectations for womanhood and the cultivation of comfortable, safe domestic arrangements were at an all-time high, expectations that came under fire in Betty Friedan’s seminal
The Feminine Mystique,
published less than a decade later.) It’s unlikely, however, that the film would have the same deleterious effect on the contemporary reading or theater-going public, as familiar with and desensitized as it is to the concept of the multiple murderess. (This might explain why, when
Hostel
director Eli Roth considered doing a remake of
The Bad Seed,
he made it clear that he wanted lots of blood and gore—there isn’t any in either the film or the book—explaining to interviewers that he thought Rhoda deserved the sort of horror icon status enjoyed by the character Chucky from
Child’s Play
, an actual killer doll. “We are going to bastardize and exploit it, ramping up the body counts and killings,” he told
Variety
in 2004.)

But reading
The Bad Seed
, one eventually gets the sense that Mr. March is not so much celebrating expressions of female power and agency as fearing them; his contempt for the other female characters he’s created is palpable. (The men in the book are, for the most part, emasculated, impotent, or completely invisible.) There is Hortense Daigle, the drunk, hysterical, and smothering mother of one of Rhoda’s young victims, Claude Daigle; Mrs. Breedlove, a busybody neighbor who prides herself on her understanding of human behavior yet remains blind to the psychological monstrosity standing in front of her; and, of course, the anxious, selfless Christine Penmark, the person considered responsible for her daughter’s misdeeds—Christine’s own mother was a psycho killer, March explains, meaning that the evil is matrilineal—and seemingly unable to stop them.

This is where Mr. March’s book is most problematic. The esteemed feminist and literary critic Elaine Showalter, in an introduction to a 1997 HarperCollins edition of the book, explains that “as in much of March’s writing, women in
The Bad Seed
are more sinister than men,” and though she swats him for the book’s implicit message that at the root of much conflict and societal upheaval are “castrating wives and mothers,” Showalter does not go far enough in indicting him for these and other hoary tropes he traffics in, including but not limited to the clueless gossip; the prim, status-obsessed educator; and of course, Rhoda herself, a femme fatale who becomes the object of affection even to those who ought to fear her most. “In a sense, he was in love with the little girl,” writes Mr. March about Leroy Jessup, an apartment-building janitor whom Rhoda will eventually burn to death in a highly disturbing scene during the book’s denouement. “His persecution of her, his nagging concern with everything she did, was part of a perverse and frightened courtship.” As Showalter herself puts it, one could say the same about the relationship between the author of
The Bad Seed
himself and the grotesque version of femininity he imagined and then committed to paper.

It probably says something about the evolution in attitudes about gender and girlhood—not to mention mental illness and sociopathy—that William March’s book would be unlikely to have the same chilling or shocking effect were it published for the first time today. For one thing, our ideas about good and evil have been complicated and expanded upon thanks to advances in the fields of psychology and criminology, not to mention child development. For another, broadened expectations for women and girls mean that, for better or worse, we are seen as more fully realized human beings, not cartoonish ciphers that either adhere to or reject conventional ideas about what females are capable of. If there’s anything in
The Bad Seed
that resonates strongly today, it’s the ways in which acts of violence are celebrated as legitimate responses to thwarted entitlement. But that’s part of the problem with America, not with its boys (or girls).