Murder wears pigtails

"The Bad Seed" has become famous as a stage play and a motion picture with a dreadful cop-out ending, though Patty McCormack's deliciously chilling performance as the child killer Rhoda Penmark was a delight to watch. Very few people who are familiar with both the play and the book have read the book it's based on, or are even aware that there was a book to begin with. And that's a real shame, because William March's book is infinitely better than the film.

William March introduces us to Rhoda Penmark, eight years old, a soulless killer with the face of an angel and a heart of pure ice. Rhoda and her mother Christine live in a rambling apartment in an unnamed Southern city on the Gulf; her father is away on a business trip that's important to his career, so he misses almost all of the deviltry that goes on in these pages. When we meet Rhoda, we realize right off the bat that there's something strange about this child; she's too superficially perfect, and we wonder why some of the adults who know her are so taken in. But adults all too often don't look below the surface where children are concerned, and what Rhoda's adult neighbors see is a charming little girl, docile, obedient, tidy and neat, a child who never talks back, does all her homework without being reminded, and gets all the right answers on her Sunday school quiz. Those who know her better, though, sense there's something not right about this child: her peers can't stand her; her teachers sense a disturbing lack of feeling or sensitivity in her, and her doting parents wonder if she's capable of love, affection, empathy, remorse, or any of the feelings that make us human. They're also aware of a disturbing single-mindedness about this child that impels her to go after what she wants with a deadly purposefulness. Anybody who gets in her way better watch out.

March gives a chilling picture of a homicidal eight-year-old who is soulless to the point of feeling nothing for anybody, caring nothing about anyone, focused only on her own needs and how to get what she wants. As the book opens, she's about to leave on a class picnic. She's upset that she hasn't won the school penmanship award she worked so hard to get over the past year, and she's furious to see it pinned prominently to the shirt of the little boy who did win it. As far as Rhoda's concerned, that's her medal. He has no right to it. She wants it. And if she has to kill him to get it, well, what's the big deal? So his mother's upset at losing her only child. She can always adopt another one from the Orphans' Home.

The most tragic figure in this book is Rhoda's mother, Christine, a doting parent who adores her only child even as she fears her and fears for her. March shows us Christine as a somewhat ordinary housewife and mother with no special talents or abilities, whose identity is totally bound up in being a good wife and a good mother. She's a very 1950's woman. Rhoda's increasingly bizarre, criminal behavior (there are several murders in this book) flashes Christine back to her own childhood; she knows she was an adopted child but she still has vague memories of her birth family, and when her search for her history brings her more information than she ever wanted to know, her world collapses underneath her. Pathology often skips a generation, but she sees herself as the bearer of the "bad seed" that she inherited from her own murderous parent and unwittingly transmitted to Rhoda, and there's nowhere she can turn for solace or advice in her private hell; her adoptive parents are dead, her husband is thousands of miles away, and she must deal with it alone.

The book's ending, which I'm not going to give away here, is a good deal more satisfying, because much more realistic, that the film's insistance that all crime must be punished. Maybe that was the way 1955 Hollywood saw it, but we know better. How else Christine could have acted is left for us to speculate. Some problems have no solution.