Christine Penmark—Rhoda Penmark

Christine Penmark—Rhoda Penmark is a mother-daughter relationship that begins in the apparent ease of a devoted household and becomes the central moral crisis of the novel. Christine first reads Rhoda’s neatness, self-possession, and affection as signs of an unusually capable child. Once she learns that Rhoda killed Claude Daigle, however, familiar gestures change their meaning: tenderness can look like performance, maternal protection can become concealment, and love itself is burdened by Christine’s fear that violence has passed through her family into her daughter.

Identity and Early Intimacy

Christine’s confidence in Rhoda is established through domestic details. On the morning of the school picnic, she finds her daughter’s bed remade, dressing table immaculate, towel laid out to dry, and a half-finished jigsaw puzzle waiting in the room. The orderliness delights her; she privately judges Rhoda more capable than she herself had been at eight. She calls for her daughter with cheerful affection, expecting an ordinary day together.

That ease is already shadowed by Rhoda’s disappointment over the Fern School penmanship medal. Rhoda had practiced diligently and expected to win, but the award went to Claude Daigle because the judges recognized his improvement. Christine tries to comfort her, urging her to enjoy the picnic and to accept that disappointments happen. Rhoda listens, but insists the medal was hers and that everyone knew it. When Christine draws her close, Rhoda submits with patience rather than warmth, then pulls away and offers a quick, placating smile. The scene preserves both sides of their early bond: Christine reaches for ordinary maternal reassurance, while Rhoda’s withdrawal and calculated charm resist the intimacy Christine assumes.

The Medal and Christine’s Growing Suspicion

After Claude drowns, Christine’s first response is protective. She returns to the apartment hoping Rhoda has not seen the boy brought ashore or the guards’ efforts to revive him. Instead, Rhoda calmly tells her she knows what happened, had been present when Claude’s body was taken from the water, and had suggested searching among the pilings. Christine embraces her and tries to shield her from the memory, treating her composure as a reason for concern rather than proof of wrongdoing.

Christine’s doubts take shape against the earlier death of the family’s terrier, which had fallen from a window. Rhoda had watched from her room and offered no explanation beyond saying that the dog had fallen. When Christine remembers the incident alongside Claude’s death, she feels a connection but cannot yet establish one. She challenges the Fern sisters for implying that Rhoda might be involved; they deny having suspected an eight-year-old child. Her defense of Rhoda is immediate, but it does not erase the growing fear behind it.

The missing medal sharpens that conflict. Christine finds the opal pendant Rhoda had taken from Clara Post hanging from a bedpost, and its presence seems to her charged with an unsettling significance. She then asks Rhoda whether what she told the Fern sisters about Claude was true. Rhoda says that it was, relying on Christine’s instruction that she must not lie. Later, Christine retrieves the penmanship medal from its hiding place and places it on the table. Rhoda’s alarm, followed by her attempt to change the subject, makes the object a point where Christine’s suspicions and Rhoda’s evasions meet. The medal is not merely a prize Rhoda coveted: its concealment connects the schoolroom disappointment to the death Christine is struggling to understand.

Confession and the Break in Their Bond

When Christine presses Rhoda about the medal, the child eventually admits that she had taken it and wanted it buried with Claude. Christine tries to make her understand the human consequence, telling her that Claude’s mother is heartbroken and may never fully recover. Rhoda answers that Claude was dead and would not know whether the medal was pinned to his coat. She does not grasp, or does not accept, the grief Christine describes. Her suggestion that Claude’s mother could take a child from an orphanage intensifies Christine’s revulsion; for the first time, Christine pushes her daughter away and tells her not to speak to her.

Even after this rupture, Rhoda returns to a familiar strategy of affectionate approach. She asks what Christine will give her for a basket of kisses, then puts her arms around her mother when Christine does not answer. Christine takes her in her arms and calls her darling, but cannot meet the child’s question with the reassuring exchange Rhoda expects. Their physical closeness remains, yet the old ease has gone: Christine’s embrace now carries the knowledge she has not been able to say aloud, while Rhoda tests whether affection can still restore the relationship to its former terms.

The confrontation becomes explicit when Christine demands an answer about Claude. Rhoda calmly admits that she struck him with the shoe, then blames him for refusing to give her the medal. Christine slaps her in panic and asks whether she understands that she murdered him. Rhoda’s response makes the moral distance between them unmistakable: she treats the killing as Claude’s fault and cries that he caused it. Christine had wanted certainty, and now she has it; yet knowledge leaves her unable, in the moment, to decide what should be done or to set any plan in motion. Her thoughts circle around the confession as her former role as comforter collides with the responsibility to confront what Rhoda has done.

Guilt, Inheritance, and the Attempt at Protection

After the discovery of her own connection to Bessie Denker, Christine’s relationship with Rhoda becomes a bond of shared horror in her mind. She develops an abnormal tenderness, following Rhoda with her eyes, apologizing, and serving her as though seeking forgiveness for the inheritance she believes she has given her. She repeatedly embraces and kisses the child in a wishful effort to make her into the loving, ordinary daughter she longs for. Rhoda, by contrast, endures these unexpected caresses in silence, straightens her clothes, and withdraws to her reading, piano practice, lessons, and other routines. Christine’s intensified affection does not produce renewed intimacy; Rhoda avoids her as her mother’s closeness grows more urgent.

Christine eventually resolves to kill both herself and Rhoda, believing that Rhoda must not suffer or be afraid. She plans the act with the same deliberate attention to detail she once gave to household matters. Before carrying it out, she watches Rhoda sleeping and struggles against the child’s placid, innocent appearance, reminding herself that the crimes are real and not imagined. She kisses Rhoda on the brow, then shoots herself with Christine’s pistol. The act is an extreme, tragic expression of maternal protection: Christine intends to spare her daughter from the fate she associates with Bessie Denker, but her decision would also end Rhoda’s life.

Survival and the Relationship’s Unresolved Ending

Rhoda survives because Mrs. Forsythe finds her alive and sends Johnnie Kunkel to take her to the hospital. After Christine’s funeral, Rhoda is out of the hospital and staying with Mrs. Forsythe while arrangements are considered. Mrs. Forsythe offers to keep her temporarily or indefinitely, but Kenneth Penmark expects that his mother and sisters will arrive and that Rhoda may go with them. The relationship therefore ends not in reconciliation but in separation: Christine is dead, and Rhoda’s future is being decided by other adults.

Kenneth asks Monica Breedlove why Christine killed herself, but Monica can offer no explanation, despite retracing what she knows and speaking with Reginald Tasker and Octavia Fern. The unanswered question leaves Christine’s final act suspended between love, guilt, fear, and the conviction that her daughter must be spared. Across the relationship’s arc, the gestures of affection persist—from the early caress to Christine’s final kiss—but their meaning changes. What begins as uncomplicated maternal confidence becomes a desperate effort to protect Rhoda from the family history Christine believes has joined them, even as that effort nearly destroys the child it is meant to save.