She stood up, smiled, tilted her head back, and clapped her hands in a lovely little gesture she'd picked up somewhere. "If I give you a basket of kisses, what will you give me?" she asked. "What will you give me, Mother?
What will you give me?"
This is the classic novel that inspired the classic film.
The performance of Patty McCormack as the gleefully evil Rhoda Penmark earned her an Oscar nomination, one of four for the film. She was forever associated with that role, and went on to star in many other movies including the low budget horror flick Mommy (1995) and the sequel Mommy's Day where she played a mother psychotically obsessed with her 12 year old daughter. I know she had a varied and long lasting career, but I always think of her as the rotten Rhoda Penmark ~ and I've never even seen the film yet!
Harper Collins released a nice trade paperback version in 1997 with an informative introduction by Elaine Showalter. The Bad Seed was written by William March.
"What an actress Rhoda is. She knows exactly how to handle people when it's to her advantage to do so."
Christine Penmark and her daughter Rhoda are living in a new apartment while her husband travels for work. The other characters include Monica Breedlove, a neighbour, and Leroy the creepy handyman. Rhoda is enrolled in the Fern Grammar School and one outing is the annual picnic. She is curt and moody as she wanted to win the medal for penmanship, but she didn't - Claude Daigle did and he had it pinned to the pocket of his shirt. Later Claude is fished to the shore of the river after carelessly falling in. As tragedy slowly spreads through the town, Christine thinks back over strange instances in other places they lived. At one place, their dog fell out the window, at another an elderly friend fell down the stairs. Coincidences Rhoda is blissfully unconcerned with. Could her child be so unempathetic as to cause such harm? Christine subtly looks for answers from Monica Breedlove's brother, who is fascinated with true crime stories. He lends her some cases to read, and what Christine finds shocks her and hits a little too close to home. Is Rhoda the bad seed? Or is Christine?
Rhoda's singleness of purpose and incessant lying presented a totally new character in novels, and imprinted the term 'bad seed' into pop culture. Only the handyman Leroy sees beneath her facade, taunting her about Claude. Does he really know what happened at the picnic or his he just agitating her with a nasty game? She is getting nervous and wishes he would just go away. He's such a silly man.
While it is entertaining, very well written and the tension increases, it might not seem like this is such a scandalous subject these days; We see every age and kind of murderer out there. Think back to when this was presented in 1954, when it would be an instant sensation. The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly called it "undoubtably on of the year's best." and "an almost impeccable novel of suspense." The New York Times declared "no more satisfactory novel will be written in 1954 or has turned up in recent memory."
With praise from fellow writers like Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, The Bad Seed went on to sell over a million copies. The Maxwell Anderson hit play ran for 322 performance, before the cast filmed the movie.
The whole package of The Bad Seed was interesting to me - the subject, the novel, the play, the movie - and it didn't disappoint me when reading it. It wasn't as racy or low-brow as I thought it might be, rather it was filled with intelligent psychology and really set the tone of society in the fifties well. When ladies' acted a certain way, and were expected to have their children behave as well, what can you do with a narcissistic demon like Rhoda?
A chilling novel I'd put next to Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings.
1954 / Tradeback / 217 pages
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