Bessie Denker—Rhoda Penmark

Bessie Denker and Rhoda Penmark are grandmother and granddaughter, joined in the novel’s central argument about inherited criminality. When Christine Penmark learns that Bessie is her birth mother, she interprets Rhoda’s crimes as the return of a family inheritance that had lain dormant for a generation. The relationship transforms Christine’s understanding of her daughter: what had seemed a baffling pattern of deliberate acts becomes, in her mind, evidence of a lineage extending from Bessie through herself to Rhoda.

The Family Line

Bessie’s own childhood supplies the earliest episodes in that lineage. Born Bessie Schober in 1882 on an Iowa farm, she was the eldest child of Heinz and Mamie Schober, with a younger brother and sister. At seven, she spread arsenic on her brother’s bread and butter, mistaking it for sugar; he died from the dose. Her sister later drowned in a well while helping Bessie draw water. The account presents the boy’s death as an accident and describes the circumstances of the girl’s death without establishing that Bessie caused it.

A further suspicion attaches to Bessie at eleven. Neighbors later recalled that her grandfather had been shot while nodding in a rocking chair on the back porch, but nobody knew how the shooting happened or who was responsible. Bessie had been alone with him, yet the quiet, wide-eyed child drew no suspicion at the time. These early incidents do not all carry the same degree of certainty: the narrative distinguishes the known accidental poisoning from the unresolved deaths and the retrospective suspicions surrounding the family.

A Criminal Inheritance

The relation becomes explicit when Christine connects Bessie’s history to Rhoda’s conduct. She believes that Rhoda is not responsible in the ordinary moral sense, and instead blames herself as the link through whom Bessie’s inheritance has passed. In Christine’s interpretation, that inheritance remained dormant for one generation before reappearing in her daughter. Her discovery thus changes the family bond from a private mother-daughter crisis into a three-generation pattern: Bessie is the origin, Christine the carrier, and Rhoda the latest expression.

Christine sees the pattern as more than an abstract resemblance. The deaths of an old woman in Baltimore and Claude Daigle, alongside the knowledge of Bessie’s past and Rhoda’s actions, form the pieces that make the connection seem undeniable to her. She alone believes she can assemble the whole picture. That conviction deepens her guilt even as it complicates her judgment of Rhoda: she regards her daughter as dangerous, yet struggles to hold her accountable for what Christine understands as an inherited condition.

The Theory Behind the Bond

Reginald Tasker’s discussion of criminal cases gives Christine a framework for interpreting the family resemblance. He argues that environment may alter the outward appearance of a persistent criminal type but has little effect on its recurrence. In his account, some people fail to develop conscience despite benign influences; they may understand distinctions between right and wrong intellectually without sharing the corresponding moral understanding. He describes this type as inborn and resistant to change.

When Christine later asks whether such a lack could be transmitted between generations, Reginald compares it to other conditions understood in the conversation as arising from an absence of something and being passed along. His response does not establish that Bessie’s and Rhoda’s crimes have a biological cause. Rather, the novel places Christine’s desperate need for an explanation beside a theory that seems to support her fear, while leaving the distinction between a character’s inference and demonstrated fact intact.

Christine’s Burden and the Relationship’s Significance

Christine’s private conclusion is that she, not Kenneth Penmark, brought the criminal inheritance into the family. In a letter to Kenneth, she calls the problem hers alone and says that she is responsible because she carried what made Rhoda as she is. She imagines that Kenneth should leave them and have children without the same taint. The grandmother-granddaughter relationship therefore reaches beyond Bessie and Rhoda: it shapes Christine’s sense of responsibility, her marriage, and her view of her own identity.

The connection also gives the story’s hereditary explanation its force and its unease. Bessie’s childhood episodes are recounted through a criminal case history, while Christine reads the family’s later deaths as confirming a pattern. The result is not simply a claim that kinship predicts conduct; it is a conflict over whether inherited disposition can excuse, explain, or condemn. Christine’s belief that the three women form a chain intensifies her shame and fear, even as the account’s unresolved early deaths and speculative theory leave that chain framed as the novel’s interpretation rather than independent proof.